In Transit, by Brandel France de Bravo

No one expected me. Everything awaited me.
– Patti Smith, Just Kids

After Kansas and before the bony ground, that tubular
nowhere of suspended belief, between always winter
and the spare room (even coat sleeves must malinger),

or an empty stairwell you enter from any floor, the door
locking behind you, multiple beginnings with only one
end but it’s your choice when to exit to the sun-sodden

sidewalk, not just a through but a there, or circumstances
that free as they frustrate, minor deaths which resurrect,
a canceled meeting, snow day, power out, missed flight,

idling between those left behind and those who await,
welcome to this holiday express in a city that never was
a destination, let the doctor’s to-do footsteps stay

in the corridor today, let the magazine pages inside
stop turning, your dressing gown fall open: it is time
for your examination, this is the hare moment the hounds

raced past, the tiny gift buried in packing peanuts,
fly away, spongy as what-if, the lily no one planted,
unexpected like a teenage girl’s gorgeous yellow rage.

***

Brandel France de Bravo’s poetry collection, Provenance, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prizein 2008.  She is co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise your Child in a Complex World and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, the Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Gargoyle,  and Seneca Review. She has received the Larry Neal Writers’ prize and two artist fellowship grants from Washington, D.C.’s Commission on the Arts. Her website is located at www.brandelfrancedebravo.com.