Jon M. Anzalone
168 Park Avenue
Huntington, NY 11743
917.568.5032
jon.anzalone@gmail.com


About 350 Words

     I know you. No, I don't know your name, I don't know your face. I don't know your style, nor your pleasures, nor your vices.
     But I know you as you watch the window, waiting for daybreak in through scratched plastic-glass. I know you as quick glimmered lights give way to graffiti, tags and trash and epics on rail walls. I know the water under the line made us nervous as children and still does. As the car-crowded roadway is given glance through steel-lattice skeletons and flickered still frame animations between support beams, I know you and I know your heart.
     You know me. I have been here, quiet and anxious, eyes on a book or tuned to some thought in my head, staring away at the river, looking inward. I'll take my time and draw a breath as I flinch at the rush of the other line passing, or ears blasted by the mad squawked cackle of the conductor and his warnings of our impending demise. You know me. We have been here before. We know this place.
     Let's make out on the J Train: for the time until Marcy, or Halsey, or Broadway Junction. Let us ride the rattle and the rumble over homes and halfways, galleries and ghettos, past friends and families, colleagues and cohorts, strangers and urban soldiers.
      Let's make out on the J Train: to Queens, to Jamaica, to the end of the line. Let the tunnel cover us, and the conductor pass us by, sprawled and awkward like the vagrants and bums as we turn around and resurface.
     Let's make out on the J Train: let's stay unmoved and ride back over battered Broadway, and back over the Williamsburg until the great seas swell, the tidal estuary lifts past the shoreline, and the rusted bridge crumbles into that feared and blessed blue as we blend together, fused in embrace as we were before time was counted in minutes until the next train arrived.