This early in the morning the clouds have cleared

and I hear the whistles of train after train

rolling across the desert five miles south in the dark.

I remember trains, the one that carried you north

to the forest in autumn as if no other mode of travel

was good enough. But we had our own, didn’t we,

the warm tongue of dope, cool teeth of booze

the dirty fingers of men whose names we could

never remember no matter how hard we tried.

What was it about us we hated so much?

Sleeping in strangers’ beds was easier than

even approaching that age-old question. The ratty motor lodge

just south of Newport that summer, its depression-ware

dishes in dull primary colors, the muddy spring

trickling down to the beach like blood from a cut.

No one could ever sweep all the grit off those

chipped linoleum tiles. The two brothers who owned the place,

what did the older one’s hands feel like on your skin?

I met a man just after you left, when we slid away

from the bar and headed out to his house

he was the nicest guy I’d ever known in my life.

There were Nam ghosts inside those walls, shadows

of his petrified wife and kids, he had to take a shower

right after we did it on the living room floor.

He laid a blanket down first and quoted the Bible to me.

The tracks were just over his back fence and I could see myself

running alongside those shrieking metal rails

nothing but the clothes on my back and a photo

of you in my pocket, your scared eyes staring

at nothing. I pulled myself up into one of those empty cars

heading south or north, it didn’t make any difference.

After I caught my breath, I glanced back toward town.

Not a single soul was watching.

Liza Porter (AZ)  won an honorable mention in the 2004 Tucson Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in the anthology Plains, Deserts, Canyons, Mountains: Women Write About the Southwest (University of Texas Press, 2005), and elsewhere.