Underground
by Jared CarterThe two children – abruptly shoved off the platform into the path of an oncoming train – are not in that instant crushed by the wheels, but instead dissolved against the event horizon of a black hole suddenly materialized out of another galaxy.
Its unknowable surface accepts each of them. The girl becomes a dove caught by the softest, lightest of nets, the boy a silver fish trapped in a riverbank weir.
The subway tunnel with its overhead coffers, the platform, the people standing along the edge, the train braking to a stop – all of this translates into long filaments of irretrievable data.
Agamemnon announces that the wind has risen, and the Achaeans can now set their sails.
Bio:
Jared Carter’s
sixth collection, Darkened
Rooms of Summer,
was published in 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press. He lives
in Indianapolis