People cut apart by cable lines, sectionalized by legs, stomach, top of head. Jews for Jesus standing in groups not hearing the man singing "Let it Be," dum, dum dum dum, as repetitions of the arriving subway drown out the words, of Mother Mary coming to me as my eyes well up and the screech of brakes drown out the emotion of what few tears I have left in me. As the subway pulls away, so do the last words of wisdom I may ever know and the Jews board the train with the Homeless and the Tired Working Class and they sit lost and confused afraid to hear the voices speaking so clearly to them. And here we wait, here we ride up and down underground lines mapped out by people who had no idea where our future would take us, only providing an efficient way to get there. This is the simplicity of scheduling your life. This is the simplicity of worlds away from where we are, of the world we are living in and of all the worlds we want to escape. These are the most frightening times where seeing a Dickenson or Shakespearean face awakens us from how much we all look alike and makes us examine how plain we are in our standards of beauty and how much we conform with color and hair and how the sky is lit up and the clocks glow upon the buildings of white lights against the faded pink clouded sky. The Empire State Building houses a feeling of what New York is, and the yellow lights fill the buildings as people return home from work to sleep away another angry night, to fill their lives with some meaning given to them from the television before the dream the dreams they'll soon forget, the dreams that are the only clue they may ever have to what is out there, because it is the link to all possibilities, the link from one car to the next, from one line to the next, from street to street and suburb to suburb, we are all connected by the underground lines that separate us and bring us together.

Dagney McKinley graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a BA in English. She has since studied creative writing at UCLA. While serving as Vice President of Creative Script Services, a company that works with writers to polish and develop scripts, she wrote and polished two screenplays of her own (Green Grass & Jack Rabbit). She has written a collection of poetry, Sand and Soul; Insanty Grown Young, and two novellas, Life Alone and Into the Womb.