For Olive

Blake Maguire / V Mag at UVA

We’re walking alongside the train tracks and I ask

if you’d ever want to disappear someday.

Silence. 

But I don’t need your response to know what it would be.

I want to leave it all in the same way my dog ran away 

from home—without so much as a word

(I only heard her howling down the street).

Sometimes when I’m out here on my own,

I feel the ground shudder and the train’s 

gradual rumble. On sunny days I wish 

it would sweep me up without a suitcase 

and it’d take me out West, somewhere on a rocky coast 

or sleepy mountain town, only to vanish again 

once the folks learn my name. 

I say, if you’re real quiet out here

you can hear the branches

snap in half 

beneath your boots. You can touch your fingers

to the rails and hear 

the clanging of the train’s burning heart; you can feel 

its breathing metal body scrapping and 

reforming itself all around you, constantly. You can hear 

a dog howl somewhere deeper in the woods.

I don’t listen that closely anymore, though.

I’m tired of hearing my own bones 

bend and break.

On some train I’d lock eyes with another passenger 

who has a kind smile and I’d try to ignore the lump

in my throat as they walk by. 

I’d turn to the window and watch 

miniature worlds passing me by, focusing 

on the wild woods and endless hills and not 

at the spectre of myself staring back 

lips upturned in a wry smile as she mouths the words, 

did you really think it would be different this time? 

The dog is quiet tonight.

Everybody leaves, 

I say. I turn to see if you heard, 

but only empty space stands 

beside me. Maybe I’ve already gone.