Going Opposite Ways at Charles in the Morning, We Shared a Look Across the Rails for Three Hundred Years

Future rain carves the lip of the station
apart. LEDs blink and blank. Every
surface freed green. Stair couplings
loosening.

Issue 7

https://manyworlds.place/issue-7/callie-jennings/

by Callie Jennings


Future rain carves the lip of the station apart. LEDs blink and blank. Every surface freed green. Stair couplings loosening. Grand dame coyote, sitting sphinx in her shining dry elevator, forgets the last stranger, his sweat, his fresh trash. No city persists in the city.

Ground is for safety, iron desire. Magnets preserved by encircling pulse. Each electricity sheathed in another. Still a soon crackle, still a near blue. Still circuit of cleverness. Still a mouth of the earth unhinged for the metal. Fine metal smoothed to a steady speed.

Still red fillies of cars, half their doors shaking open, setting fires for leisure. Still their obsolete brackets, shed lit to the tracks and away. Still the tilt and glistening keen veering south. Still the hum and the rattle, to be an arrival, the hum & the hum, arriving & arriving

cleaned, soiled, placed, made clean, made soil, made a place, made into a place, left a place, left


Callie Jennings (@aporianautics) is a trans writer, musician, & game designer based in Boston. She received the 2024 Stacy Doris Prize and 2023 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize and has work in manywor(l)ds’ 4th issue, Zone 3, Troublemaker Firestarter, Fifth Wheel Press, and Fruit Journal. Her newsletter is at threemachineexpression.substack.com, and chances are she’s dancing.