Little Jimmy Dead Eyes, on the bus

Those were just the shadows of trees; they could not
follow me. I did not look back, took what I could
and moved on. The bus seats were all occupied.
The ticket stub was a knife in my pocket; the wounds
it had caused were smothered with prodigal salt.
The faces of small-town people bound for the city
were the completion of fog, of soul, of density.
We were fleeing museum artifacts--once made sacred
inside a glass enclosure, once content in our husks.
Rain, all twenty-five years worth of it, beat down
on the asphalt, on the roof, against the glass.
It would drown the song of my small-town friends.
It would muddy the dialect of the lost.

I imagined the city, and it was still intangible--
a stream of light and dust across an empty room.
I had to leave the door open, to enter that room,
to ask myself what I was supposed to say,
to find out that nothing would ever move
from now on, only that splinter of light.
For a while, the dust began to unfurl, acquired colors.
And I saw the nightly neon of the city streets, the gray
of concrete, the glare of glass towers, the gleam
of steel, the prism to disperse the glow of urban rivers.
I had my ticket stub to cross that river, get to the other side.

copyright 2007 Kristine Ong Muslim
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Barnwood magazine
Contents 07