Night Moves
One train tends to follow another, if you wait long enough.
Here in the center of the state, silence is evasive: cars,
cicadas, the bells of the Baptist college. Or inescapable.
At the heart of any poem is my hope that it will tell me
how to live, or to live. Lately, I've had this fantasy where
I interview the trees that have stood in the many yards
of my life. Growing up, my mother called the sycamores
out front our neighbors. All trees were women. I thought
one day I would be one. My mother dreamed of having her own
daughter, & when I was little I held tight to a sycamore,
looking down at my mother. We both live alone
with our dogs now. She listens for deer. I’m listening for
a second train, its whistle like permission or a premonition.
A prayer. A neighbor. All the other words I can’t bring myself to say.
See Rock City
My brother’s sister stands beside him in a photograph.
The photograph remembers two children who are in us
in the innocence of anybody. My brother & I haven’t lived with
each other since we were these children, & now I place myself
beside the now that his body is as we brush our teeth
in the same mirror. With my body beside his body, our likenesses
seem even more alike, looking at each other as if the mirror
were decades long. The decades were as long as a mirror is.
When I told my brother I was his brother, the good glass
of his face gave me back to me while we grinned at each other.
When I told the children in the picture who I was, I said
to them I am you; I am your brother; you two are brothers.
I know the children can’t help their grinning.
I just don’t know what this means I’ve done.
Acie Clark is a trans writer from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. They’re currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Central Arkansas. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, American Short Fiction, Passages North, and The Massachusetts Review.