Subway Prose Poem: Passengers

Abstract

Two Poems Joseph O. Legaspi POETRY 3 Subway Prose Poem: Passengers Train doors glide open fora Nepalese boy with eyes likepolished onyxes. He keeps his ricehat on, framing his strangebeauty. It ispast midnight, New York City. We are all visitors here, passing through terminals. An African family sitswearing theirSunday best. A leopard head-wrapped woman falls asleep on her lover's stiffshoulder, his shirtbuttoned tightlyup to his neck. A man wears a bloody gauze eye-patchwhile rolling silver balls on his righthand. People are pass ing throughour lives like refractedlightor shadows. A homeless man announces every fleeting station. What is trainbut transport toother lives? What travelsbeneath the secret faces?A nun ofMother Teresa's order shep herds a young sister, tight-fisted, holding her rosary. In my messenger bag I carrybooks, scissors, and pieces of raw chicken. Subway Prose Poem: Don Quixote Enter: crowned man on horse, rather man wearing a horse?tattered pelt of rattybrown fabric,loose button eyes, nappy mane. His wayward majesty, he looks as ifhe bore a hole through a boat and plugged itwith his body like a socket. Pulling at the reigns he gallops heavy-skirted,kicks, trotsand neighs, or is itthehorse? Where does man end, horse begin, and vice versa? They are Centurion fusion, Sagittarian dream. As his cassette player blares "Oye Como Va," our jitteryequestrian canters,every coin clinking inhis paper cup splashes of futurecoffee,theephemera of tobacco.He has stepped into this realm as iffromanother, unleashing the stuff of characters?entertainer, prince, clown, lunatic, myth icbeast?and he dances past theballerinas biting into green apples, down theaisle throngedwith his reverent subjects like jurorson benches, thenopening thedoor and stepping into the metallic sunset of thenext speed ing car likeDon Quixote. Joseph O. Legaspi isthe author of Imago (CavanKerry Press), winner of a 2008 Global Filipino LiteraryAward. Born in the Philippines, he was raised there and in Los Angeles, where he immigrated with his familywhen he was twelve. Currently, he lives in Manhattan and works at Columbia University. A graduate of New York University's creative writing program, hiswork has appeared recently in American Life inPoetry, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, New York Theater Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, and the anthologies Language for a New Century and The Waiting Room Reader. A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, he co-founded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American poets. November-December 2009 i25 ...