Pat Jones

In Another City

by Antonia Clark

           (On a line by Sam Byfield)

The yellow moon, the factories, brief snow —
I’m only passing through aboard a train
streaking through your night. Once, long ago,
in another dingy city, in light rain,
I lingered at the station with some lover
or other, someone arriving or departing —
both of us young and destined to discover
absence. The old story’s always starting
or ending. And the chapters in between
slip by like nameless towns along the way.
The drifting moon and snow, a view I’ve seen
a hundred times. A woman dressed in gray
waits on the platform. I notice, as we pass,
my own face through the window’s misted glass.

Antonia Clark works for a medical software company in Burlington, Vermont, and is co-administrator of an online poetry forum, The Waters. Her poems have appeared in Loch Raven Review, Mannequin Envy, The Pedestal Magazine, Rattle, The 2River View, and elsewhere. She loves French food and wine, and plays French café music on a sparkly purple accordion.