Kathleen Nalley

To me, transcendence. To you, a train.

for John Pursley III, who believes in the concrete 

This is a poem about loss and degeneration,
threadbare veins and bones that snap
like beans,
calcium eeked from forearm, 11 months
of passing marrow to mouth through breast.
(I’m supposed to say something about a train here.) 
Your caboose is neither shiny nor red,
nor does it belong to you anymore, rather
it’s hitched metal chain to box car,
pistons and axles, knuckle together, rhythmic,
the uphill drag and drone stalling the rush. 
Your body is a three-cylinder steam locomotive,
a third-generation diesel, transferring goods
to passenger, passenger to safety,
safety to rocker, rocker to crib,
choo-choo-chewing
the insides out. 
Another journey, six-weeks giving
yourself to another, follicles failing
and hair breaking from stem.
Infection in the chassis, needing oil or
antibiotics, something to stop
the gear-tooth-growl.
Stammering for a handle.
Something must brake. 
But the switch doesn’t switch, the junction
elapses, and you go from being who you know
to someone lost along the track:
a viaduct-shrouded hobo with open-front,
button-up shirt, small blanket squares
draped over shoulders. 
Calipers scream and flange engage, but
the concrete is never concrete enough, and
all that you feel just whistles away:
your heart, a penny flattened, your foot
locked by steel, your milk, diesel
for combustion. 
Until this, this is what you’ve become: a rust-splattered
metal shell clinking along trestle; a wrinkled-face
conductor peering over ballast-black
distances traveled: two ton-miles and
230 words to say joy, duty, hurt.

Kathleen Nalley was born and bred in South Carolina and works at Clemson University. She studied under James Dickey at the University of South Carolina, then took a 16-year hiatus from poetry writing while life happened. A recent workshop at Clemson inspired her to pick up the pen again. blossombones marks her publishing debut.