Wednesday, August 13, 2008

PARADOX

Clear scenes across smudged windows

Eyes distorted in reflection


Caution cones on a construction site,

colored glass and concrete walls.


Little girls walking in Mary Janes

past men carrying briefcases.


Starbucks coffee in laughing hands

entering elevators, climbing stairs.


Keys unlocking oversized doors.

Computer screens swelling.


Mannequins dressed in chiffon.

Foaming ice cream cones,

across steel bars.



Cheryl Caruolo

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

1.
Broken glass and

we, only minor characters wailing in the rain, into the wild.

The stranger sitting beside you, like a wet match, is no help to you now.

It’s time. Step out from the shadows of loving, of leaving.

As a child steps out of the long grasses
when the game has ended.

Like the ocean, pounding, smoothes the sharp edges
of broken glass.

2.
Chase Street

in the chaos – and the children
upside down and dizzy
the music continues as before

floating with deception
around and through the voices
and the words continue as before

the grayness envelops
even the laughter
as the sky threatens us once again

and the only comfort
is the warm perfection of milk resting on my tongue

as life argues between the bitter and the sweet
just as it was that time before


Alexia Chamberas
the grey patina takes over
the moment objects in the urban landscape
have no clear definition
no sign of depth from each other
there is one veil of vapors
escaping from the sewers below
people in streets are out of focus
blurred movement
some seem to be figures
descending lower strata
where other undistinguishable breathing corpses
lay in cement tunnels
trains load & unload the grey cargo
grey cadavers fill common graves below
grey patina takes over
the moment

Aldo Tambellini
from “brianscan 90”


there is no escape from the black
night
it compresses the negation of colors
into
the dense shield where no light
filters
keeping the sun’s corona
in
a forever eclipse
it’s
the last train & the next train that
takes
the human cargo into deeper tunnels
faces
in cars in carbon & graphite
features
imprinted in tar graffiti
details
lost in the even blackness
someone
forever sits in a station bench
before & after
the next train & the next
rush
tunnels to tunnels
someone
at another station
a face deformed
corroded by acid HATE
waits
for a train that never
stops
at that station

Aldo Tambellini
from “brianscan 90”
D Green Line
14 September 2008

No smoking
Sold out laughing
Take your mother
Seriously
Transit Project
The destination of this train is
Put the phone to her
I just got off now
Reading a book
Stroking her hair
My mother always says
It’s not easy to
Stop requested
There is a passenger hugging his bag
Flower, Worldvision, North
Next Stop: Brookline Hills, Safety, Celeb
It makes your life so much easier
Fossil
Ring bell for all stops
Ouch!
Enter, exit
Next stop: Beaconsfield
Magenta umbrella, purple dress, shoes, man in suit, Shopaholic,
Talking on the telephone
Lopsided images
Transparent, parents, parenthesis
Reservoir
3642
Caution: Door Swings Open

Zayde Buti


Fenway Station
8 September, 2008

Tattoo leg and two girls—
Freckles everywhere
“…it was actually really cool…”
You have to bring everyone I know
Except for…
I dropped blood
Went in sideways
Puff-Puff
“I ain’t gon’ stifle myself, bitch!”

Zayde Buti
Experience with trains and buses:

#1
Strangers get the best of you,
The did me that day too,
Turning my face to one side
I never wanted you to see me cry
But you did, and now I’m here
Bus stop, South Station
With a stranger man who
Rubs my back as I cry
Touching what should be you.

#2
Hello commuter,
I used to like the way we
Breathed through correspondence
But that changed the day
That you became my neighbor,
Well, the dysfunctional,
Same city, kind of neighbor,
Now I take the train
But never see you.

#3
I remember that morning,
How it was cold then too,
As we waited at the bus stop
At the same inappropriate hour
Which impatiently taps its feet
To the anticipated arrival,
It was different that time,
I remember how
It just came and left
We stayed to watch
It leave, south bound, and we
Were pleased by failed departure

#4

Stalled in the backseat
Of a sunrise train we were
Protected form the stiff
Air and the angry revving
Of early morning engines
In the sleep state of that hour
We fell asleep, confused
Between cloths we use
Then too often loose to describe
Our too quickly vocalized
“I love you’s”

Nellie Large
LC Nojechowicz

Back on the Subway

I resumed commuting recently. Now I have a love-hate relationship with the subway. My eyes and ears almost burst some nights, amid the thunderous trains, the too-sweetened nut roast smell, and crowds banging up against me.

Working people. Frazzled mothers dragging kids. Teenagers in hooded sweatshirts. Loud girls in pointy shoes. Crazy people mumbling, toting old newspapers in shopping bags. Whether it’s Orange Line homeboys, or Kendall Square yuppies, the intimacy of riding with strangers offers mystery.

I got to the subway late one night, finding only stragglers. A Chinese couple sat entangled on a bench, oblivious. Sitting on his lap, she wore a short pink coat, and her dumpling legs were all over him. They spoke quietly, laughing and kissing. When they got off, I imagined them strolling towards a cafe, an intense romantic knot, separate from the world.

On another night, Downtown Crossing was particularly bleak in the overhead glare, and the young accordionist who so often played there, was gone. He’d always stamp out the rhythm as he played, and in his brown fedora, the slight, solitary figure seemed like he’d stepped straight out of a Milan Kundera novel.

He played a Paul Simon tune one night, and I found myself quietly singing the refrain, “they’ve all come…to look for America…..Cathy, I said, I am lost, but I know you are sleeping….We smoked the last one an hour ago….”

I hadn’t sung that tune in so long. Standing there, across from the huge Toyota billboards, I felt old, but beautiful, if only in my own head.
Katie McCarthy

There was a screech that I felt through my chest. Lights started flickering for a minute and then they went our completely. I attempted to calm my nerves by using what little light that poured through the dim tunnel encompassing our metal death-trap to read my Boston Herald. After about ten traumatizing minutes of tedious squinting, the T took off again, lights resuming power and we pulled ever so smoothly into the Harvard Sq. stop. Terrorism? No. Thunderstorms? No. Just Traffic.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Riding The Train:

It is raining and cold when I get to the Train Station. There is an orange sign that says “Green.” This station feels dirty. The train is dirtier. As we pull out of the station, there is an immediate thundering overhead. The subterranean nature of the experience roars in my ears.

I look down the long empty train. The hand holds hang like nooses. There are two men sitting a long way from each other. Their necks are bent, eyes straight ahead, looking somewhere near their feet. They look like they are on death row. I have joined them. We have nothing to bond us but our despair. It is a one-way train. I am snaking into darkness with the damned.

At the next stop, teenagers get on - tight jeans, puffy coats - pull out their phones, put their thumbs to work, easy focus on the screens on their phones. They seem hard-wired to the experience, thin white plastic cords discretely draping from their ears, like a tribal accessory.

The roaring above is too much. I get out at Downtown Station. I remember I didn’t make a plan, didn’t buy a map, don’t have an umbrella. I walk. I look for a drug store for something to write on. The sky gets darker. I go down a side street. On both sides the building go up, up, cutting the light. The architecture feels conspiratorial, like an Arthur Miller graphic novel.

I go back into the subway, decide to ride to the end of the line with my new writing pad. Again, I am deeply aware of the descent. One stair case. Two stair cases. It gets dirtier. The dirt is greasy, almost slippery. The air tastes lethal, mechanical.

From the second staircase, I can see the crowds standing in the gloom, waiting for the train. It looks like they are on their way to concentration camps.

I realize people do this everyday – voluntarily. I think what it would take to steel to this every day.

I can’t find a place in myself that could do this. There would have to be people at every stop, reaching in, pulling me out of the roaring snake, dusting me off and giving me a high-five. There would have to be live video feed from the arctic with a large yardstick marking the inch that didn’t disappear because I got on the train that morning instead of taking my car. There would have to be people from the humane society with live polar bear cubs that you could hold and cuddle and feed with a bottle while you are waiting for a train – some connection to the outside world. Not the subterranean grave with the roar of despair overhead.

As I make my way to the Orange line, there is suddenly the sound of sad, Spanish music. I think it must be coming from a loudspeaker, but it is so precise and unadulterated, it can’t be coming through a speaker. I see a man standing with his denim leg up on a bench, holding his guitar with it’s neck toward the sky. The musician has his head cocked as if is he listening to a secret from its curved body. I feel so grateful for the music and the auditory interruption of the mechanical scream of the trains. He seems divinely sent, the beauty and fluidity of the music so incongruent with the atmosphere, it almost brings me to tears.

The train opens. I step in. It is crowded now. It’s shoulder to shoulder, wet, humid. Despite the crowd, it is the feeling of the trains rumbling above that is crushing.

I squeeze into a seat. There is no way to pull out a pad to write or a book to read, or do anything that involves violating the space outside of the immediate boundaries of your shoulders.

At the next stop, two women get on. Both look like they stepped off a page from the Macy’s catalog, fashionable coats, French berets, steele-blond hair descending, flawless skin. One sits next to me. One stands in front of me. They talk with easy intimacy. They speak Russian. I can’t understand a word but it seems they know each other well from the pace of the conversation, the lazy spaces between the questions and answers. And I wonder how I know what I know about people or if it’s all just projection.

One woman has a black, quilted coat with a belt cinched tight at the waist. The buckle is silver. It says “Pink.” I think back to “Green” on Orange. Despite becoming part of this mass of humanity and despite the fact that I have never felt so inconsequential in my life, my egocentrism still tells me that events are being choreographed for my entertainment.

I find myself reaching for a convenient way to put this experience in context. I say, well, this is a valuable experience in that I will really appreciate living where I do and enjoying the lifestyle that I do. And immediately the thought feels inspired by church ladies, clucking their tongues at the unfortunates in Africa. And I feel like I am leaving my fellow man in the dust, or in this case, in the grime of the subway.

A small boy comes on with his father. He is oblivious to the code of silence. He keeps standing up on the seat. His father say “please sit down, the train is going to go now.” He sits down. He is reciting the conversation he had with his dad about this trip. “A lot of people are on the train, right Dad?” “And they all have to go somewhere, right dad?” He stands up again, faces out the window. “Go train go.” He says. “Please sit down,” the father says. The boys sits down. The mechanical voice comes over the loudspeaker and asks people to pull their head in. The boy stands again, bounces, yells out the window, “go train go.” “Please sit down,” his father says. The break in the tension is almost palpable. It has the same effect on me that the guitar music had. His high voice almost like music. We finally pull forward. I can still hear the small boy chatter. His enthusiasm is like a wrinkle in the starched fabric of the collective silence. He could be in Disneyland.
I note that I have never met a claustrophobic toddler, can’t remember meeting one with personal space issues.

But I am not a toddler. I am a neurotic adult. I bolt at the next stop. I am finding a train back – up – and out, into the fresh air.

I try to feel mythological in my return trip, like I have just traveled to Hades – to go mano y mano with the God of the underworld. But I don’t feel heroic. I just feel like an escape artist. I anticipate my resurrection, out of the darkness, into the light of day.

The return trip is relaxed, the intensity is lifted by the promise of the known and predictable. I am simply observing now.

There is a guy with a stocking cap about ten feet away. He catches my eye because he is looking at people like me. Our eyes meet. I pretend that it didn’t happen, keep scanning the crowd or stare straight ahead, letting my eyes glaze over. We stop at Ruggles Street, more people get off. There is a noticeable iota of breathing room. I meet the guy’s eyes again. I decide it happened accidentally, fidget with something I don’t need in my purse, adjust its shoulder strap, loosen my scarf. A young woman gets on with glow-in-the dark white pants and a matching white hat. The pants are transparent. I can see a dimple in the fat on her but. It is too much visual information, too close. I avert my eyes. My gaze passes the gaze of the man in the stocking cap like two people crossing the street. I am on to him. He is working for Nancy - another cultural spy. We will glance at each other as we leave the train, our heads will nod imperceptively, like two FBI agents.

Tomorrow I will rise several thousand feet into the sky. When I do touch down, it will be 5280 feet above sea level. That may be as low as I ever want to go again.

Laurie Davies



Thinking out the Window

Have you ever thought and thought until you begin to think you have thunk yourself silly? When I’m not talking, I’m thinking…always especially when I ride the bus. I sit watching the sad woman sulk in her seat across from me, and the homeless man mumble pieces of words and I wonder what would happen if everyone’s thoughts just came popping out of their heads in full animated sentences. Would it fill the bus? As I sit on my two-o-clock bus headed down town I start to think as the road passes below me. I have way too many complex thoughts to fit in a small place such as ones head. So as I begin to think out the window, letting selected thoughts flow into the warm afternoon air. My thoughts begin to fly, some up some down, one hits the pavement maybe to be found by some hobo who has lost any rational ones of his own. It’s like a gift. Or maybe the old woman inching across the road will be swept away by the thought about my juicy summer romance, and instead of going home to her microwave dinner and two hours of “The Price is Right” she will be inspired to go and find a scandalous one of her own. Now that I think about it, it’s selfish not to share all these amazing thoughts with my city. I have far to many anyway. I may not be able to see or touch them, but I feel as it slams concentrated feelings into my soul that are forever changing me… and now there is no way I could think about having thought myself silly.

By: Chelsea Davies-Lechner