Subway Interlude to Reality
by Oscar Everts
The woman descends
the subway steps,
enticed by the shadow
flowing from her toes—
entreating her mistress
to follow, only to disappear
in the unnatural light.
A sigh of doors,
a sifting of bodies, free—
for the moment.
But the city still presses
down on their hunger
and loneliness carried
through the arteries
as the grinding, the grinding,
shrieking ecstasy of wheels
churning steel rails—
torment souls imprisoned
in a monstrous worm
hurtling through his labyrinth.
The windows flash in the
darkness framing her image
staring with eyes questioning.
Her station arrives—
in a parting of doors,
and long legs carry her
up the stairs, surging
towards the dying of light.
Flowing from her heels
the shadow reappears,
clawing at her departure,
but possessing no life
of its own follows reluctantly.
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Everywhere, Love
by Nan Brall
No one spoke
No one sang
No one wept as
He walked down into his grave
Except You.
You embraced him
Unashamed
with a deep love that brought a hush
under Seventh Avenue.
Brought together by
the wilderness,
his inner organs screamed
their demise
while the trains
that held millions
of pasts and futures
sang in a choir
with their mouths shut
and their eyes closed
surrendering freely
another
wingless gesture
to the upper atmosphere
reached
only by contemplative breath
and fear.
That weight that
diminishes and
melts into the
discard of many people
walking quickly past your slumber,
will it not be made weightless?
Translucent?
Light enough to rise above
the 1 9 and gravity?
To That Place
all of us may view
and some of us may enter
Embraced and Unashamed
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