Passenger

Poetry, Sofia Bagdade

Our town is an open mouth.

Brief and slack, faces gape

in the dirt-breath mirror.

A stop snapped alive by the

conductor on the Maple Leaf 

Line. We watch the white dash

lanes merge and separate

as magnets under flame. 

Stuffing dead leaves and 

droplets on a cold bleacher

down the throat of a road

that covers with dark ice every

January. Tiny, white valleys

like milk teeth, crumbling

with loose smoke from

paper factories. A stranger

to the violence when you

return somewhere in between,

blue eaves like bright moons

orbiting, never near—just

streaks of breathable light

if you could trace it with a

telescope. The cedar box

of memory, furnished only

in the pale glow of first

footsteps, elbows bent

to the direction of home:

the still-alive rail tracks, 

desperate for a wilder pace

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Sofia Bagdade is a poet from New York City. Her work appears in One Art, The Shore, and Roi Fainéant Press, among other publications. More of her work can be found at sofiabagdade.weebly.com or on Instagram @sofiabagdade. She finds joy in smooth ink, orange light, and French Bulldogs.