By KC Trommer (Assistant Director of Communications)
When the train picks up speed, it sounds like a woman screaming,
one woman all over the city, releasing her heat in a high, steady wail,
smearing her red mouth along the tunnel walls. I make and unmake myself.
When the doors open, anyone can come in, anyone does. I circle back
downtown, leave the book open on my lap, look over the map
that lays out the routes. The city is a muscle; we feed it. The woman across
from me shrivels up her face, sticks a finger in each ear to kill the sound of
the train rounding into Queensboro Plaza. My hands are warm
on my lap: they are for making and unmaking. I thumb the seam
of the sketchbook open while the city sits and waits, indifferent and unblinking
like all gods. My mouth is a siren, my body mine to make.
Wherever I go, I am this woman. Whoever needs erasing, I erase.
KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poem “Fear Not, Mary” was selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2015 Fugue Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Blackbird, LitHub, Prairie Schooner, The Sycamore Review, VIDA, and in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press, 2018). She is the Assistant Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.