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Ghost Train
The March heart of winter chipped ice from the sky. I stood on the corner in a Doctor Zhivago hat I'd borrowed from my hosts to walk their dog.
A panhandler pressed me for change, but nothing changed. Although I and the dog had just arrived at this corner, we felt it to be the same corner of
previous arrivals, the same fur hat from the universal closet. The tracks shivered, prescient, the train somehow ghostly, backlit a luminous green,
bright as the drop of a guillotine. I suddenly realized how dark it had got, how dark it had been gradually getting all along. In the train's phosphorescence,
I glimpsed commuters with heads bent over newspapers. A ghost conductor punched tickets as if in the pulling away from the platform of this life
we need proof that we have lived. I did not desire to stop at this or any station. I wanted to hurtle forever parallel to these streets but
above them, nothing to teach, have, leave, or know. Here and not here, the life under this hat has disappeared, clean gone before you saw it go.
Rhoda Janzen
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:hi:
RL
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