SAFETY FACT 5
You cannot always hear a train coming, especially high speed and quiet electric trains!
A dead one doesn’t know anything anymore
She doesn’t become a spirit with the right to hold
or invite herself to tunnel through you
If the train got me I’d be just like most people
Most speeds are high, most times cut in half
Keep coming back or reverting to undergrowth
and other things people have built—
the awkward but accurate position of “we”
destroying “ourselves” to build the railroad
I haven’t liked to pretend to be big
when I know I’m small
listening for the sounds of great violence approaching
Listening to you and the sound of movement through you
The movement we belong to like a border
between the planet’s hot history, magma states
soft ball and thread stages and the way
when the water touches us we roll up
We leave the water more full of water than ourselves
Sink gently because when you’re relatively small
gravity is not your most important force
Forces will take ownership of our surfaces
and our one day dead material
bursting with lionfish-like lights
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.