Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Traveling by Train
And faster past another frozen river,
the brambles, shrubs, and underbrush of dead
woods and the garbage that was left behind
by runaways and skunks: the plastic bags
and twine, shoes beside forgotten brands
of beer whose cans, so battered by the weather,
have all but disappeared—like the whiteness
of a smoke after it’s cleared. And you’ve been on
this train too long to know the time; you’re lost
between the meter and the desperate rhyme
of clacking tracks. Home is nothing here.
You’re gone and in the going; can’t come back.
Malachi Black is the author of two poetry collections: Indirect Light (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2024) and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God (Yale University Press, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2023). Black’s work has been featured in exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including in several musical settings, and has been translated into French, Dutch, Italian, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of San Diego. For more information, visit www.malachiblack.com. (updated 7/2024)
His AGNI poem “Traveling by Train” was selected by Mark Strand for the Best New Poets 2008.