TERMINUS
Early morning pokes
the passengers, eyes
barely open, lifting
ego from a day
that hasn’t healed
into a yesterday. We feed
on our forgetfulness.
The capacity to stare
and still not see
the claustrophobia
chewing off its leg inside
the terminus. And how
it sprung from all those rails
hammered into the dust
and the displaced workers
and their descendants.
Like anything that ceases
to be public, the roped-off
waiting area in Union Station
is just an oversized key, unable
to unlock the air. We gaze
into the ticketless beyond.
Some kinds of looking
can make a person more
invisible. How easy
to consume and then
denounce, a stillness
delineated by the belief
that everything is pulling itself
to meet us. Outside
the window, the bones
breathe so patiently. Without
their seasick skins,
they seem almost religious.
When the currency of water
gets devalued, we wade
in the ocean between
the sheets of plexiglass.
The kingdom crackles
through the megaphone
and the conductor sings
It’s a beautiful day for a train ride.
Brent Armendinger is the author of Street Gloss (The Operating System, 2019) and The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying (Noemi Press, 2015), both of which were finalists for the California Book Award in Poetry. Brent’s poems and translations have recently appeared in Anomaly, Asymptote, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, Ghost Proposal, Green Mountain Review, Interim, and Tinfish. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Mineral School, Blue Mountain Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Willapa Bay AIR, and the Community of Writers. Brent teaches creative writing at Pitzer College and lives in Los Angeles.