Soul Train and Other Poems

By Madeira Miller

Soul Train

Previously published in Abstract Literary Magazine

The ambulance was two cars ahead
and my windows were down
in the heat of rush hour traffic
on a Monday evening.

The children bickered in the backseat,
exhausted from the school day.
They were silenced by the piercing
scream of the sirens and flashing lights.

Who was strapped tightly
onto a cot in the ambulance?
God forbid, was it a child
as small as the one kicking
the back of my seat?

Could it have been an old woman
who fell down the stairs?
Or a man who went into cardiac
arrest? My prayers were vague
and ambiguous as I gripped the wheel.

Over yonder were the train tracks
where I had my first kiss,
many years ago as a teenager,
aching for adventure and danger.

I wondered if the ambulance
transported a teenager like my younger
self, who had gotten into trouble –
if her mother gripped her hand
frantically and wept by her side.

The roar of the oncoming train
brought traffic to a standstill.
The ambulance waited
impatiently, sirens still screaming,
as if begging the train to hurry.

I sat with baited breath
and white knuckles as an eternity
passed as slowly as the train
on its tracks with silent
passengers. The world paused

but the train could not.
I imagined a conductor
with sorrowful eyes, willing
that the cruel passage of time

and boxcars and railroad
tracks spare the stranger
strapped to a cot at the
unforgiving, unyielding stoplight.

But the world is not so kind.
I watched the flashing lights
cease. “Mom,” spoke a small voice
from the car seat in my own vehicle,
“why did the sirens stop?”

Baptism

I step into the shower to cleanse
myself of everything I did last night.
I look down at my hands and I’m
catapulted back to 2009 when I picked
blackberries against my mother’s wishes
on the night before I was supposed to sing
in church. I tried to hide the berries in
a plastic baggie and then I took a bath.
I could not wash the purple stains from
my flesh and I sang hymns in church
the next day with purple fingers.
I could not meet my mother’s eyes
in the audience. I cannot meet my own
eyes in the mirror of my own apartment
now. It fills with condensation as water
droplets drum against my skin. It is clean
but maybe not clean enough. I remember
the little drummer boy in the Christmas Play
in 2010 had dirt beneath his fingers from
playing outside. I recall getting baptized
on Easter Sunday in 2011 but all I could think
about was how sticky my hands were from
the candy I pried from plastic eggs. I’m
a grown woman and I never find time to go
to church. I wash my hair and rinse the
dirt from my skin, which will never be as
soft as it was back then, and the grime of
the day’s labor is scrubbed from my body
and I’m wrapped in a warm towel, brushing
through hair which is much longer now,
but I still don’t feel clean. Anyways,
I’m thinking about getting baptized again.

Roadkill

Previously published in Abstract Literary Magazine

The world stopped when Bambi’s mother died.
The television flickered technicolor visions
but you couldn’t see through the saltwater
that gathered in your eyes.
Your tender heart tried to wrap its frightened mind
around the concept of gone forever – yes,
even in the illustrious spring.
Now in the springtime you get allergies.
You can barely recall that burning, frantic sadness,
two decades ago, that overcame you
when you mourned a dead doe.
Adulthood doesn’t come in technicolor;
you don’t scrape your knees and bleed
half as much as you did as a clumsy kid.
You’ve become numb to the pain of the world.
There’s the hollow sorrow, of course,
that comes with reading the news.
The newspaper only really comes in black and white
and you don’t have time to finish the crossword
before you have to leave for work.
The commute is not magical;
it’s predictable and routine.
There’s a mangled fawn sprawled across the pavement
and you pay no mind to the tragedy of this.
A dead deer is not an affront to God,
not even if he has speckles of white
scattered across his broken back.
You do not remember how to grieve
like you did twenty years ago.
When Bambi died, the car did not stop.

Wishful Thinking

I gather each sound and sight of you
and I place them in my mouth
to savor rather than to swallow whole
(I would never swallow you whole),
suck on them thoughtfully
like pennies in the mouth
of an unsupervised child.
That’s what we are and were,
wrapped up in your blanket.
Your scent is still draped over me,
but anyway,
if the sun rose in the west
and set in the east,
and if the hands of clocks
were as gentle as yours,
I think we’d be together right now
rather than something I have to write about
before the details fade into oblivion.
In short, you taste like
wishful thinking.

Madeira Miller is a writer and poet seeking a creative writing degree at Missouri State University. Her work appears in ‘Dreamstones of Summer’ by WinglessDreamer, ‘Praised by December’ by WinglessDreamer, Every Day Fiction Online Magazine, F3LL Digital Magazine, The Gateway Review Literary Magazine, ‘My Cityline‘ by WinglessDreamer, The Bookends Review Creative Arts Journal, ‘Sea or Seashore’ by WinglessDreamer, Bridge Eight Press, In Parentheses Literary Magazine, and Dipity Literary Magazine.