(for Emily)
At the museum of old trains,
the ever-rusting graveyard bound
by a living stream and a heavy
humid drapery of weeds hung from pines,
you in slim black mourning dress and boots
pick your way among the rubble
of metal bones and tracks, then stop to pose
on the fourth step of a wooden stairs
disjoined from what it belonged to,
and turn your head this way and that,
spilling sunlit hair down one shoulder
then the other.
Reprinted from Mid/South Anthology (Belle Pointe Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes. Used with permission of the author.