subway stop between 31st and nowhere

It is after the plague hit. It is New York City. It is April.

A train goes by, spurring warm dust on my cheeks,

faces pass me, unknown, lit in the unworldly glow of fluorescent lights,

each a honeycomb of life, daydreams, pathos and sweat. 

I’m dressed to the nines, in a pebble gray silk blouse

and starched navy pants, my feet squeezed into patent leather boots.

My brain is sick, unwell. Burning in its own sentimentality, lonely, 

watching the subway cars go by with dark regret swirling in my veins, 

stopping my breath every time my eyes are lowered to the tracks, 

intrusive winds of thought zapping my brain like live wires. 

Lately I’ve looked for happiness everywhere, in a new skirt-suit, 

in the orange of a pill bottle, in the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, 

in a car going 93 miles an hour, in the curves of the stone statue 

at the edge of the blue-green pool in Prospect Pond, 

in the severity of the night sky, littered with diamonds I can’t reach,

in the slow footsteps of my roommate coming home at the break of a red dawn, 

in the creamy, silver lines of the new toaster with glass sides, in shadows

no one else can see. Subway stations taste bitter, a stop between worlds,

a concrete, alien space, aching with the human need to be something, 

to be someone. Everyone’s eyes seem to be somewhere else, 

looking into Italian courtyards through the square window of the Instagram feed, 

dreaming of different lives, of being someone else, someone you can’t quite reach. 

The train gleams like a metal worm, swerving underground, 

like the black waters of the River Lethe, sending shock waves of ungraspable

motion, leaving the air a little emptier, a little lonelier. 

My new linen pants itch uncomfortably, the way your skin itches 

after a particularly bad night of drinking, hoping a glass of whiskey 

will caress your neurons, sending you to a better place, 

somewhere it doesn’t matter where you went to college, 

where you’ve forgotten how much you miss your cat, 

where the world turns slower and the sun shines brighter 

and the strawberries taste how they really ought, how they look. 

I am troubled by the fact that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely. 

I look at the other platforms, places I can’t reach, hazy and metallic. 

The loudspeakers announce the last train for the night. 

I put my feelings away into my pockets, stuffed with lies and years gone by, 

hoping that one sentence would save me, yes, I am afraid.