SEPTA Regional Rail #9204

‍It’s too hot
for October and the sun feels like the palm
of a hand pressing down on us;
no shade on the stoop, watching cars scream down Burmont
while we sweat,
and smoke,
and you’re saying people drive like assholes
‍and I agree, but what we’re really saying is
‍we can’t keep living like this.
‍
That summer I lost my job
(and I loved that job)
and you totalled your car
(and you loved that car)
and now we have to live without everything
but each other,
dead broke and crashing
in your sibling’s spare room in West Philly
where you won’t let me walk alone at night.
We feed the cats, cook dinner, do dishes:
small domestic genuflections
as penance for taking up space
and Violet tries to sleep on the couch in the corner
and you stretch your food stamps to feed five people
and I buy cigarettes in Delaware tax-free
with humiliating piles of change
and we fall into bed together, ten in the morning,
turning motes to floating gold dust—
pull the curtains shut.
Everything is awful.
You burrow your face in my neck and I hold
fistfuls of your shirt in my hands like they are the rope
that will save us from drowning.
‍
And what we can’t know is that
much later,
outside our apartment,
there’ll be a fire escape
and the night sky fringed by lacy dark leaves
and you’ll be saying look, there’s Cassiopeia
‍and I’ll agree, but what we’ll really be saying is
‍
‍we could survive anything together                             I couldn’t have survived it without you.


‍I’m Very Sorry that You Have to Have a Body

‍Ich habe nicht genug Beine
‍is what you said to me to prove
you knew a little German,
translation: I don’t have enough legs
‍and I laughed, but you meant it.
‍
My parents still live
in the house I grew up in, but
my room is painted different colors now;
they got rid of the linoleum
and redid the bathrooms, replaced
the Pepto-pink kitchen countertops 
with staid beige marble, finally painted over
the outline of a rubber snake I smacked 
against the living room wall
in second grade.
Sometimes we’ll be driving somewhere and
you’ll point out the window 
at the apartment you lived in
the year you turned eleven, or eight, or nineteen.
Once we did two U-turns
so you could inspect a butterfly bush
you’d planted, but we couldn’t get a good look
and you said it would make you sad
if it had died, so we kept driving.
‍
You rhapsodize about wings, fins,
and antennae, lament your lack of limbs
in foreign languages; I observe you
eyeing the segmented anatomy 
of all manner of bug and the skeletal structure
of corvids with the restless energy 
of a renter scrolling Zillow or Apartments.com
in the months before the lease is up.
Three-billion-year-old cryptid, chafing at
this vessel’s limitations, making plans
for your next physical form.
‍
When we met you said you hated mirrors,
they do nothing but depress you.
You tousle your hair without looking, don’t
wear makeup anymore, no need
to see your own reflection; you already know
it’s all wrong.
Too few legs.
‍
We’re cosmic shards chipped
from the same semi-precious asteroid,
my being recognizes yours
in every timeline, but this version of me,
matryoshka-nested with past selves I can’t remember,
can only tell you about this life. The one
where I saw you first, yellow hair phase, lemon boy,
like biting into citrus fruit, smelling salts: suddenly conscious.
Where, between the two of us, for our own reasons,
we have punished
and abused our poor defenseless bodies
with every extant substance
and implement, cataloguing every calorie consumed,
ripping skin off lips and fingers, carving apologies
into the silky flesh of forearms, having sex
we didn’t want to have with people
we didn’t want at all. This is the life with
your mom’s manic ex-husband in it, and he
defaulted on the mortgage, so for a while
you lived above a dive bar, where
your neighbor solicited for crack money and
your life went up in smok
eafter the second house fire; my memories are framed
by an honest-to-God picket fence. (Brown though.)
And through some ancient vibration,
meteoric magnetism, Instagram
snapshots and Spotify links, we entered 
each other’s gravitational fields and at once fell
into orbit, long-lost binary stars.
‍
I pour myself over you
at night, jigsaw-fit to fill your negative spaces
with my abundance of curves,
hook my legs into the space
where your knees bend, wrap my arm
around your renovated chest, nose
in your neck, feet entangled.
I wish it were enough.
I wish that I could love your body
in a way that makes it feel
like home.

Meg Barton is a very tired bisexual cis woman in her early 30s. She has a degree in linguistics, a career in finance, and poetry burning holes in her brain.

‍
Published 5th March, 2025.