that summer I lived in a children’s book—
my loft above a flower shop, my skirt a flap
to lift. My parents bought a bouquet
and I let it decay. I left them
and rode the train to work like a cartoon worm.
As a kid I learned worms could be cut in half
and grow back. Boys at recess held sticks
and performed incisions.
Girls made beds for the beheaded
out of leaves. When it rained, flowers sprouted
and worms came out of the ground.
Delivery men opened trucks of misted roses—furled,
red apologies for boys to carry through the city.
At the station a man held his dick
like a bouquet, the veins a reminder of stems or blood.
A boy I once babysat told me he wanted
to be a train when he grew up.
Not a conductor, the train itself. Barrel
and whistle, with a drawn-on smile.
I thought about tires that fit in my hand
when a man pushed a girl onto the tracks.
I thought about snapping
together Legos to build railroads, giving toys names
with two sing-song syllables. In the tunnels
of dreams, the boy became a train like he wished.
He ran me over again and again.
Even though we’d once blown dandelions
into wind together. In children’s books death
wasn’t supposed to exist, but it always
did. In pictures my parents grew stooped, drooping.
The boy asked when I was going to die
and if he would sooner. That summer bullets hit
a school on TV. It happened in the time it took
to turn a page, to fill a watering can,
to step on a worm and find its organs
on my shoe. I sat in a skyscraper box
and thought: In children’s books jobs were real,
corporeal. Everyone was a librarian
or a teacher. A conductor ushering us
through our station of buried darkness
toward somewhere else.
Kara Lewis is a poet and editor based in Minneapolis and Kansas City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Letters, The Pinch, Willlow Springs, Stirring, Permafrost, Bear Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have received three nominations for the Best of the Net.
