At the end of our session, the poet asks us to write a second time, but not to share. We all have to plan our exits, she says.

“The true leap consists in introducing invention into existence.”Frantz Fanon, qted. in Gaztambide-Fernandez, “Decolonization,” 61.

You stand at Holmesburg Station, and it is cold and windy, hot and still; empty because you’ve just missed the train back into the city. Again. This is a haunted station, the roofs of old factory buildings just visible over the barren rise of gravel and weeds and iron tracks, and you think, the trains don’t run here anymore. There is no way back. You think this as the express goes by at a speed so fast and frightening it’s like a cartoon of energy moving through a sound barrier.