I
This city is starting to consume me. It waits for me, and I feel little pieces being torn off by the second ones. First one person goes, then another. My brother never talked to me. "But by all means," I say deferentially, holding the door open for him, "go on through, I will follow—the last light to go out wins."
II
The city is suspect because it tears parts off, gnaws on them, and then vomits the remains down the gutters, into the streams where the filth ends up; and slowly, the filth becomes part of the cement that tries to hold up buildings. I once passed a brick building and saw that I was trying to hold up what looked like an entire house. I could tell because outside a tree was blooming.
III
Be adorable, wave your enticements at me. You are the last to succumb, sitting on the porch. But you never succumbed; you went to talk to your husband and your children.
IV
Unwed mothers and wild alcoholics, shrews and cunning dissenters. Gargoyles inspecting the state of affairs; the iron railings below them serve both a decorative and practical purpose. Tunnel and disappearance is repeated as each takes people down and raises them, doggedly, into what is—an entirely different part of the city. And that is the sound of the train; it is going by. Dwarfed, skyscrapers, below, the sun, draping the tops of city blocks, and the men and the women and the woman, the children and the child. Steel, office, buildings. Unwieldy surfaces glint noisily through the streets.
Martin Jones is trying to get into graduate school for English Lit. He lives in West Virginia and is 36 years old.