No Home at Last & Gutterpunk Zorro
No Home at Last
You don’t question the conductor. You prefer to be passive,
whisked from the station and silently gliding as if soaring,
each car and passenger a migratory bird towards a hybrid city,
An Atlanta and Paris and St. Louis and Santiago in one.
The elation of skyline in sight, journey, now approach,
all through a still window, the unlinearing jerk between moments,
the many missing beats.
The introduction at night on elevated tracks,
lights like stars dot-distributed precisely into
structure, skyscraper, grid, gradient, outskirt.
Condos and cathedrals jut from ridges along the hills and mountains beyond
that make a cradle for us like in Mexico City or San Francisco.
You trust a place if you can see it whole. It can’t swallow you if escape is visible.
The train refuses to announce its presence, sliding through districts-
financial, museum, garden, warehouse.
From our viewpoint gentrification fulfilled its promise: this is the finished product;
the gleaming paragon. All those developers whispering in ears
with rolled up sleeves and plans and pay-offs
weren’t at it for nothing.
You’ll find mess out there or it’ll find you.
The contentment that arrives with arrival
but the sliding door stuck,
a reflection impedes peering in.
No loved one greets you.
You’re whipped back off the balcony
just in time because up the street apartment building
by apartment building crumbles like massaged cookies.
God’s breath melts churches and schools
like popsicles in a furnace, the border of destruction
advancing, surf toward a dozing sunbather’s towel.
The dam split and the water gushes invisible.
The small group of newcomers chosen by the fleeing train
gape as tracks collapse on our tail,
our swift savior winding through
the doomed metropolis, out the way we came.
No one abandons their home, no traffic for once.
Workers refuse to piss off bosses even if
they’ll end the workday under rubble.
Why on this gray day mass burial with
no storm, no wildfire, no mudslide,
just a great mixing of bones and artifacts
for excavations hereafter?
The first stop safely at the edge of the city, and from the platform a separate track
leads underground in the wrong direction.
One woman, possibly a lover you left in some far off city long ago because she told you to,
is on a pump car, a velocipede, entering the tunnel: this is her city
and she’ll walk its ruins. She doesn’t look back or wave.
Some new age here on earth must now begin.
Gutterpunk Zorro
Once, a naïve country boy gathered the courage
to descend down into the metro, that putrid
purgatory of stress and boredom, in a city too
vast for comprehension, call it New York, and
a man with tattoos spreading like poison ivy from his
fingers up his arm and neck, even across his forehead,
notices him staring, drops his mask, maneuvers
close enough to smell dog and every bad habit,
even note a reddening infection around a nose ring.
Fencing, isn’t that what you did in college? he sneers,
reaching out, stroking his adversary below
the sternum, several swift slashes in a Z.
Whik, whik, whik, he whispers and
stomps out the sliding doors.
I peer down, panicked like I’m the woman next to me
who fails to slow the bleeding before EMTs arrive.
What I later found funny was not that I thought
you incapable of murder or that I don’t still feel
the hot pressure of your finger on my stomach,
a phantom scar, the first letter of your name.
Rather, it’s that a couple years ago at a party
the host handed me a samurai sword she bought in
a pawn shop and I was so worried about chopping
off an appendage or just swinging it around
my head like a helicopter screaming y’all can all
go to hell that I couldn’t get it resheathed and
back up on the mantle fast enough. It’s that
in high school my best friend and I were thrown
out of a fencing class we talked our way into at
the local community college when we lashed out in
adolescent rage and repressed sexuality, sabers to
bee bonnets, ignoring, not even hearing, the unpaid
instructor’s shouts. It’s that the previous day on
another train, a man, detailing his every divorce,
insisted I don’t need fixing, and I thought,
You’re right, none of us do, and I also thought,
You’re wrong, all of us do.
Dustin King would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When nothing good is playing, he teaches Spanish and runs a small non-profit that performs mutual aide work in Richmond, Va. His poems pop up in the Potomac Review, Blood and Bourbon, Drunken Monkeys, Ligeia, as well as in the June 5th, 2022 edition of Sublunary Review.