And another knot in the tangled string of things I miss is my body, whirling small in the belly of Penn Station, with those smudgy tickets and too slow receipts abandoned in flickering cubbies, and those low places dirtying hands, those overtasked fingers ungloved and reaching to zip the slack jaw of a loose leather purse around a wallet’s quiet hunger, near the hungry saxaphoning the terminal, and the standing room audiences schooled still beneath an old sign, unrelenting as any urban god, their chin up prayers impatient for that constellation of asterisks to blink beyond peak, for those stars to finally sleep, and those rails to cheapen enough to loop the river of this homesick crowd back along its silver suburban loom, until Monday.
POET BIO:
Danielle Zipkin (she/her) lives in Brooklyn with her husband, plants, plecostomus, and roomba. She has poems published or forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Humana Obscura, and SamFiftyFour, and elsewhere. When she’s not educating middle schoolers, writing, or quarantining, she enjoys dancing, scuba diving, and borrowing other people’s pets.