Stephen Lackaye
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The Night Bus

We’d always thought that it must take a solemn step
to reach the Underworld, through a cleft rock, driven
by love or fear, a plain and heavy coin in pocket to pay
the dour ferryman. It takes twenty bucks from Baltimore
and no serious passage of time. A woman nearby reads
a coloring book, the man beside her shushing anyone
who speaks. Twenty bucks and the time it takes to cross
New Jersey’s famous, feral reek, the flame-lit tracts of
refineries, watching mile markers decrement to the throat
of stone we’d always known would open beneath the river.
At Forty-Second St. and Eighth, one hundred prophets
wait where I’ll descend from the smell of urine to the
smell of older urine at the Port Authority Terminal.
Other fictions told us of the host of milling pagan aides,
warned us not to eat, or speak aloud our given names.
One weak mythology elaborates a City of Regret,
while in the city of my birth another boy I knew is dead
for no reason better than the fact the earth moves
continuously, so decreed by the distant deities
of molten core and supernova, who no one gives a damn for
in revenge. Even the truth is a story that makes no sense.
Dear friend, whose photo sits atop a casket where
your head is crushed; dear friend, I didn’t speak to
for a decade and won’t again, you never missed me,
and yours is not the first death I’ve spoken crassly of
before I’d bow in upstate parlors with the bereft.
My worst sin remains the theft of an orange from one
of two large silver bowls in the foyer overfull with them.
There was never any risk the dead would keep us.
Another driver honors my return, then curses our way
through Newark. I can tell he cares for nothing
recognized as belief by riders with their want for story
feeding small privations, who tap their unlit cigarettes
three hours against their teeth, sing beneath their breath
to the rats in the riddled box that shares their seat.
Look at how I fit among them, friend, the man who weighs
an orange on his palm, puts all his memories in little rooms
the way we learned to commit the early cantos. I can’t tell
a solemn step from the show I’ll later make of it.
If there’s a City of Regret, we enter at the depot lot
behind the stadium, emptied from one keening transport
for a local bus and our regular lives, whose halting conduct
takes no time to betray our fresh mnemonics,
leaves the words we thought of soured in our mouths,
the fruits we thought to carry puckered in our fists.

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Stephen Lackaye is the author of Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape (Unicorn Press, 2016), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and an Eric Hoffer Prize. His poems can be found recently in Southern Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Shore, Radar Poetry, and Los Angeles Review. Stephen lives in Oregon, where he is a bookseller.
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