The realm of possibilities

I Covered a Great Distance Without Effort

The seats faced backwards although the train car
was headed forward. The engineers designed it that way
intentionally: the cushioned seats at the front facing
in toward the rest of the car,—passengers’ faces,
a Japanese flower arrangement of faces.

The platform began receding. Whoosh.
Not in the sense of being unconscious or knocked out, but
I was coming to

see, that is, to understand an endurance test deep
inside that things could have
gone differently, the furniture. It could have turned out
completely different. That’s within

the realm of possibilities, as if the election were in our favor
somewhere else, in the United States of Atlantis.—

I left off just as I was going
to make a mental note in that regard,

that we were carried along, passively, in motion
without walking or running, spastic reflex in the legs
—To sit down in one city, stay seated an hour and a half,
and then stand up in a small town Milton Bradley
must have modeled its tiny green
Monopoly houses and red hotels after.

Jeffrey Jullich