Tag: trains

Chugga Chugga by Emily Kittleson

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Chugga Chugga

I stand by the window, toddler on my hip.
We watch trains surge by the dead-end
street. He waves and says die.
I say buh buh bye train.
Thinking again, say hi train,
bye train. That is the nature
of the thing, pulling itself along:
one train arrives and leaves
our window at the end of Milton street.
He will learn to transition
from the easier duh
inside the mouth
to buh at its threshold,
each time he waves and says die
to the ducks at the lake,
to his grandparents,
to our beloved, his other mom,
work badge clipped to her collar,
and, oh, he waves die die
to his own blessed belly
as we pull a shirt over his head.
Look, he is right:
we are all trains
saying hi and bye
and hi and die
and hi and bye
and every day
is a boxcar passing
and no one can know
how long it will go on

*

Emily Kittleson is an emerging poet living in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her wife, toddler, and an aggressively affectionate cavalier king charles spaniel. She graduated from Luther College with a B.A. in English in 2011 and works a day job at Minnesota Public Radio.

Two Poems by Tony Magistrale

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Aging

After I gave the old woman an overdue shower—
forced her under water might be the truer fact
as she had not wished to be bathed,
her hair matted, sour bits of dead skin flaking off
legs and arms, she emerged not with gratitude
but meanness: why did you do this to me?

After I dressed her in fresh linens
and fluffed her white hair with warm currents of air,
it occurred to me I had performed this task
forty years ago, helping to arrange a pregnant
version of her for our date night together,
finishing the evening’s preparation
with a wisp of perfume.

*

View from My Train

In open fields west of Venice,
olive-clad hunters wait patiently for game

eyes averted from the ground and its trail
only long enough to acknowledge

the sound of this passing train. Crows
seek their breakfast in the aftermath of human threshing

scouring corn fields, swooping low,
dropping sharply to disappear

among ravaged pale-yellow stalks.
In the cool breath of late autumn,

the sky slate gray horizon to horizon
blackened trees shorn of all color,

I trace again the deathless patterns of repetition
the inexorable journey into winter.

*

Tony Magistrale is professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recently published is titled More Fun Than Pretty (Moon Pie Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Spillway, Chiron Review, Green Mountains Review, South Florida Poetry Review, The Cape Rock, Slipstream, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other places.

Miracle Girl by Julie Weiss

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Miracle Girl
              –Adamuz, Córdoba, January 18th, 2026

Six and barefoot, you falter
along the rails like a phantom

in limbo, though you´re very
much alive. Virtually unscathed,

reporters will say, despite
the wreckage around you.

Despite the bodies, writhing
like unanswered questions,

or still as a billion-year-old
mountain. The bewilderment

of limbs you crawled over
to reach the broken window.

At what point in your search
for your family does your mind

ramshackle, fracture under
the dead weight of despair?

At what point are your thoughts
launched off their tracks?

Maybe when a barn owl
screeches, or a big rig thunders

past the tragedy that will define
the rest of your life. Soon,

all of Spain will illuminate you
in halo. Miracle girl, they´ll say.

As a civil guard leads you
away, maybe you hear voices

among the debris—your cousin,
your brother, mostly mamá

and papá. At what point will you
understand they´re phantoms

now, crashing towards you
from the wrong side of the divide?

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com