CHECKING THE TRAIN SCHEDULE FROM SIX STATES AWAY

by Lorraine Henrie Lins

There’s a new station in the narrow town
where middle school bled to high school,
where I learned to drive through narrow turns

over a tight black bridge with yellow graffiti—
it’s a gleaming monster of cement and chrome and glass
in the town I used to never say I was from,

where we’d skip stones across rusted tracks
at rolling green bottles we’d sipped to empty
while the wounding song of cicadas

churned the hot damp boredom of July—
a glint of a station where clean destination signs
are well-lit in blue-white fluorescents

and soft-listening music comforts its passengers
dotting the new plastic benches that line the tracks
of the narrow town where I learned to drive.