One Train’s Survival Depends on the Other Derailed: After Susan Mitchell

Abstract

One Train’s Survival Depends on the Other DerailedAfter Susan Mitchell James Allen Hall (bio) In a bar in Chicago like a bar in New York, the anthems hang in the jukebox air: I Will Survive, Maybe This Time, the bartender’s nipple ring catching the discoball’s shrapnel light, on a night which begins in wan November, dancing with a chestnut-haired Aries, the scorch of us hurtling like a train I want to step in front of. He takes my hand when we leave the bar, we walk a greasy sidewalk to a private courtyard, he kisses me and the world goes magnolia, quick white flash back to the garden I hid in as a boy, interred in a noiseless mangle, the tree’s opalescent sepals masking my upturned face as I imagine a real life GI Joe come to the rescue, smiling down into the plot, shovel in hand. He kisses me on a night so rinsed in purity it begs for its own ending. The night’s begging lodged in me. We’re parallel trains lurching forward, jaunting windows jaggedly aligned. Don’t love the train, it craves to be emptied. When we part, a February starfield blooming above us in the dead of winter, he’s wiping the kiss off his lips. Don’t miss me, he says, hailing a cab, paying the driver, saying goodbye with a sterile hug. I miss the stars, [End Page 85] which had leaned in close. In November, I could die happy, his saliva drying on my neck, the breeze violining its song along the sloped avenue. The song expires on the radio of an overheated car speeding eastward into the night after the secret courtyard, after the snow lowered its gentle hammer on the skulls of lovers, the night I know in my sudden blood I am going to kill myself. Don’t miss me, the discoball moon says to the lake. Don’t miss me says a boy to the plastic partition, the snow melting down his face in tracks, in February, on a night stricken at last of starlight, shocked dumb, night with its shovel and its covering dark. [End Page 86] James Allen Hall James Allen Hall is the author of Now You’re the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), which received awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, he teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York–Potsdam. New work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Bloom, and Ninth Letter. Copyright © 2011 Middlebury College Publications