Joanna M. Weston

OLD TRAINS

Musty smell of curry
burned into flea-ridden
seats, horse-hair pricking
cracked mirror
antique prints, brown
daguerreotype school
girl, unlettered eyes,
leather window strap
with worn snub-holes,
fag-ends strayed under
seats where extra suitcases
support dangling feet

Creak, bluster and crack
of ticket-collector's
rough slide-door arrival

Tingle of cinders harsh
in a tunnel, window crashed
shut leaking sooty smells,
reflecting wide-eyes, disheveled
hair, uneasy eagerness
until they burst into
country or long lines of smutted
laundry, row-houses smudged,
gardens wilted, sooted

Down the corridor, clackety
clack to the toilet-stink,
balance and pee but don't
touch: flush and watch
the sleepers catch and fly
under, sticky handles of sweat and
long-passed disease

Return to the clunkety-
clunk old velveteen; nothing to
do but smell, touch, watch

CP

Joanna M. Weston has published poetry, reviews, and short stories in anthologies and journals for twenty years. She has also published two middle-readers, The Willow-Tree Girl, and Those Blue Shoes, and a book of poetry, A Summer Father.

SPEWED UP
Joanna M. Weston

Holding Mike over the toilet
while he vomits mixed drinks,
I am not going to be ashamed
of myself for being
part of the mixing and drinking,
not going to be disgusted
at the smell of sick
or the feel of his trembling body.
I look at the white gate-legged bath
against the white wall
and want the evening to bury itself.

Four of us sitting around
experimenting with tastes, mixtures,
laughing, getting a bit cross-eyed,
but I am feeling grown-up at last:
this is what grown-ups do...

until the world is turning sideways and
Mike needs a bathroom and
I must show him where it is
but he needs me to stay
and I do, suddenly sober:
earth no longer tilts, wobbles,
as he bends over the toilet.

I face the stupidity
of what we have done
and I could have stopped it
because I am twenty
and he's eighteen; but
it’s no good because it has happened:
I disgorge self-disgust
over Mike's shaking back.

—First published in Psychopoetica anthology, 1995

CP

Joanna M. Weston has had poetry, reviews, and short stories published in anthologies and journals for twenty years. She also has published a middle-reader, Those Blue Shoes, and a book of poetry, A Summer Father.