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POETRY CONTEST

Subway Ride    
 
 


	It was only a scratch, a tiny line on my cheek, a mere tracing of a 

fingernail whose polished edge held a single flaw – an insignificant burr –

 which found a weakness in the layer-dermal, nicking a capillary and leaving

the slimmest, most trifling river of blood ever drawn.

	When she had boarded my car, heads turned, eyes pointed, women and 

men alike. She stopped only to survey the field. I sat alone. She stalked the 

space, her eyes hungry, her breathing shallow and quick. 

	Me: Stillness. A rabbit in the tall grass,  

	She sat, gracefully swinging her hips around and down. Next to 

me. Our clothing touched but it may as well have been flesh. 

		I dared not look, tried instead to remember her from five 

seconds ago. Black leather waist jacket, tailored to fit. Black jeans, bought to 

shrink. Delicate porcelain skin covering sharp cheekbones, thin red lips, 

short black hair, not kempt, not messy. An aura, god, an aura. From the loins 

of Artemis and Eros. 

		My heart accelerated to the speed of a thoroughbred on the 

homestretch. She glanced at my hand, a gold stop sign encircling a wedding

 finger. The way she swayed her head and shoulders to music only she could 

hear told me such things didn't matter. My eyes darted with uncertainty or

 embarrassment or expected failure, and she laughed. 

		Do I make you nervous?

	Maybe a little.

	Good. 

	Then a kiss. All this occurred, except the kiss, I swear, silently,

 telepathically, while she stared sidelong at me. With her little finger she

 snatched a trickle of sweat from my cheek, and cut me.  She daubed at my 

face until molecules of red smeared her fingertip. She held it up to me; I 

tasted. She tasted. Finger lingering inside lips, mouth. Gentle vacuum, 

pulling, raising clouds of ache that swirled and danced with the vapors of

 pheromones and perfume. My nostrils flared for more. I inhaled all she could

 give, sorting through the odors of commuters and students and vagrants and 

old men rotting from the inside and diapers in need of changing and the 

ozone made by the sparks of the electric motors that propelled us.

              We rounded a bend and she leaned into me with a pressure that

 was more than mass times velocity times centrifugal force times the

 gravitational pull of bodies. I leaned too, away; don't show the neck. I prayed
 
for mercy.

	      The train straightened out and she took her time un-leaning.

 Finally upright, she looked at me again. I fidgeted, my eyes searching for a

 safe place to land. I could only look at her. We stared for minutes or miles,

 then the train slowed and stopped. She slid off the seat, still staring, and rose

 to leave. She kept me in her sights all the way to the exit.

	      The doors parted. She waited. The cut on my cheek burned and 

I didn't know if it would be extinguished by staying or going.

	      It's not my stop. 

              I know. 

              It could be, though.
 
              I know that too.

 

                                        F. John Sharp

                                                 Aurora, Ohio