Train Graffiti – Gretchen Tessmer
will you be mine?
fuck off
is your line
says the girl
in the yellow raincoat
to the man
she sits beside
in a ramshackle
train car
filled with
vagrants from
the Other Side
smoking
joking around
(well, they try)
with coal dust caked beneath
their ragged fingernails
violet veins
of old fairy blood
twisted deep with
wanderlust
that starts wistful
but ages rotten
as red apples
ugly as iron rust
Gretchen Tessmer is an attorney/writer based in the U.S./Canadian Borderlands of Northern New York. She writes both poetry and short fiction, with work appearing in Nature, Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, among other venues.