S/he did not go by bus.
S/he did not leave by train.

The sad horses are still
tethered downtown, their antique
trough for sale. For the centennial,
the sad horses will cue the parades,
the throngs of hamfisted officers.
********The bit, bone against.
********Taste of it? Metal
********like blood, of course,
********or a warm body, or
********a plush equivalent.

Here, we have mostly only known the donkey.
Or the zoo, lumps of
orangutans pressed against
glass hide against
glass peel hide
off glass. Or that bit about brutes, cereal boxes and sunday cartoons.
Ride away into the poster sunset.

The teller put two fingers under
his chin and in forming the L with his thumb
says thank you.

In dream: a Spanish church—Saint
Victoria—at the top of two thousand stairs.
An elm, pedagogical in its lean.
********(acid blue
********leaf work
********of elms)
The students were waiting, lined
against an old world wall.
Number One was waiting, “patiently,”
they said. Patiently like leaf work’s cut
into acid blue sky, like the flood’s work
on a ribboned trunk. There, Number One
points, was the year of my birth.

The inaugural lecture is posted on Victoria’s door.

Brimming vat, long walk, prostrate light: lightbulb
slate light of the northerly storm. First the wind,
as if motion harbinged wet **** dark **** portrait flash.
I am empty full up, the students chant.

*

Emma Train is a poet from Berkeley, California. A graduate of UC Davis’s MFA program in creative writing, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is writing her dissertation on contemporary queer ecopoetics. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Colorado Review, Grist, and Interim. She was most recently a finalist for the 2020 Omnidawn Open Book Prize and a finalist for Interim’s 2020 Test Site Poetry Series.