Myrtle/Wyckoff M
by Rachel R. Carroll
Stubborn mid-March cold
snaps its teeth in me like an apple.
I am thinking of loss in the narrative sense -
a failure to change in time.
The months lay
pomegranate-seed-scattered
across the Ridgewood roofs.
My coat is optimistically thin,
my heart a paragraph -
straining to expound on a single point.
Sunset trickling in like a syrup.
I stopped trusting platform countdown clocks
around the time I stopped minding.
The Empire State, that boastful
scrap of skyline, lit up green
and staring me down until
train track tide gives way to
rush of rattling windows between us.
Thin yellow strip of warning at the platform’s edge,
then stepping forward
again, without you.
Rachel R. Carroll (Ray if you’re nasty) is a non-binary poet who is also hard at work on their first novel. Their work has appeared in Polaris Magazine, The Gravity of the Thing, SUGAR Magazine, and is forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the magazine Lesbians Are Miracles. After studying Creative Writing and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California, Ray moved to Brooklyn, where they have worked as a bookseller and special educator. When not busy pursuing their masters in middle school education, Ray can be found reading compulsively, maintaining their snail mail correspondences, or desperately trying to establish trust with the colony of cats living outside their bedroom window.
