SAFETY FACT 4
Railroad tracks, trestles, tunnels, bridges, yards and rail cars are private property.
When I can’t see the family of a person
I can imagine they’re their own property.
I can go wandering over your bridges and trestles
your lonely but in-constant-action tracks and yards
and weeds and tags your body’s the entrance to.
A person can be owned but not own or
the train goes the other way toward
the opening point I linger near.
Bodies are mutually exclusive—this not that—relax—
that’s the way to love them mine including yours—
The tracks stretch night and pale day.
I feel like I’d be moving in the right direction
if I were behaving in the bravest way
my bravest self imagines:
magnetic explorer! Congress of crossings!
Friction is one way to generate heat
whether you want it or not
what’s the biggest gift
a train can give us?
I don’t think it’s safety
It might be electricity
It might be outside the soaked tradition chest.
Kate Schapira is the author of TOWN (Factory School, Heretical Texts, 2010), The Bounty: Four Addresses (forthcoming from Noemi Press before year's end), and two more books forthcoming in 2012 from Stockport Flats and Horseless Press, as well as chapbooks from Flying Guillotine, Horseless, Rope-A-Dope and Cy Gist Presses, and Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Providence, RI, where she co-curates the Publicly Complex Reading Series and teaches writing to college students and 4th grade scientists.