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

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,

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.