Poetry by L.I. Henley
“Anatomy of a Train” was the first-place winner in poetry in the 2024 Golden Quill Writing Contest.
Borrow this train, he said, my father himself a freight car
hulking mind aimed headlong, eye fixed on the rails.
Was he talking to me? Sometimes I couldn’t tell—
he was always on the horizon, disappearing
into one tunnel or another, surfacing suddenly to bark an order
or teach me, his voice the same for both.
There was no going back. The antique train was coming with me
to school for show-and-tell. If you lose it, or if it breaks…
Have you ever felt a person’s presence, looming, making
its own cool shadow, even when you’re apart?
Because the person is a train, life-sized and miniature at once?
I landed with a thud, wind knocked out, every time he picked a fight
at the grocery store, in line at the bank, on the street, with a man
he once arrested or wanted to, loaded pistol on his hip, words
exchanged, self-propelled, steam puffing, Borrow this train, and I
had to though I can’t tell you what I said about it to my first-grade class.
He’d drilled me on its tiny anatomy: ballast, blastpipe, buffer,
the caboose is at the end, the conductor’s office, deadman’s handle, and I knew
my father was the conductor, the train, maker of the glass
windows the passengers looked out of, and together we were
the junction, splitting off, a fork in the dale. This train, I might
have said, belongs to my father. It’s very old and very fragile.
I think I knew the word without being told. It was a word I could feel.
How carefully I carried it home, sweating, trembling as I placed it
back on the mantle, everything glass, the little girl and the father
in the caboose, the father sleeping after a graveyard shift
she mustn’t wake him, the air between them fragile.
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, her books include Starshine Road: Poems (2017 Perugia Press Prize) and the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through. Currently, she’s writing personal essays about illness, love, and the Mojave Desert, which have appeared in Brevity, The Southeast Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Fourth Genre, The Los Angeles Review, and The Mississippi Review. She teaches English composition at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Visit her at lihenley.com.