I Covered a Great Distance Without Effort

The seats faced backwards although the train car

was headed forward. The engineers designed it that way

intentionally: the cushioned seats at the front facing

in toward the rest of the car,—passengers’ faces,

a Japanese flower arrangement of faces.

The platform began receding. Whoosh.

Not in the sense of being unconscious or knocked out, but

I was coming to

see, that is, to understand an endurance test deep

inside that things could have

gone differently, the furniture. It could have turned out

completely different. That’s within

the realm of possibilities, as if the election were in our favor

somewhere else, in the United States of Atlantis.—

I left off just as I was going

to make a mental note in that regard,

that we were carried along, passively, in motion

without walking or running, spastic reflex in the legs

—To sit down in one city, stay seated an hour and a half,

and then stand up in a small town Milton Bradley

must have modeled its tiny green

Monopoly houses and red hotels after

Source: Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis (Litmus Press, 2010)