Valentines: “Amtrak Again” by Jess Yuan
AMTRAK AGAIN
They are called Jersey barriers because
they come from New Jersey. They cannot
be beautified. The train slows while overlooking
the intersection—where one barrier is lettered
in spray paint MAY GOD and another
FORGIVE ME—bright blue where the gray
cement meets the gray street. Each thought
flies through me, unable to stop.
I’m reminded of how the world used to look
when I was enthralled by asphalt shingle roofing
and clapboard houses, these ways of making a life.
Coming to you from Baltimore, it’s dark
by New Jersey. We cross the water and see
block letters on a parallel bridge, spelling
TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES.
Neck craned in disbelief—whose land did they take?
The announcer insists that every seat is sold.
I make a good neighbor, alone with my thoughts.
I can recognize some conductors by now,
who change crews under New York.
The spring we married, I was afraid to ask
more than five days off work. On Earth Day
at City Hall, the pair before us had four parents,
the pair after, a jean jacket. We were uncomfortable
and tired. When we returned, your Director
of People and Culture had mailed us
a monogrammed tray with your single laureled S
etched on its glass bottom. Despite
our back and forth, our scorn of church and state,
when we added our license to the public record,
I was awed to enter the archive with you.
Afterwards you found and I found new work.
Our beloved cat lost his sight. We learned
the stages of life. Loss, loss, loss.
For some time, two trains at similar speed
allow a long glance through the fog-thick night
into the warm capsule of red vinyl seats
zipping up the New Haven line. Near empty
by Boston, it’s cold here, and my mind worn down—
each thought flies through me again.
About Jess Yuan
Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is the author of Slow Render (2024), winner of the Airlie Prize, and Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. She is a Kundiman Fellow, and her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, jubilat, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.
