American Realism

Here is what happened: 
I was staring at the man on the train whose eyes
had been emptied out like pockets and then not 
tucked back in.
I couldn’t look away. His hair was long 
and receding high up on his forehead.
He was so thin that when he stood up, 
his pants came all the way down.
He didn’t notice.
The man sitting next to me, clothed and sober,
looked at me because it was only the two men
and me on the train.
He started to get up to tell the other man
about his pants but then 
the man pulled them up himself. 

Here is how I told the story to a man:
it was weird. It was no big deal. 
I felt bad for the man. And then after, 
I went to the American Realism exhibit
at the art museum where I saw a painting
called Hibernation. It was a picture of a mink 
sleeping inside a series of intersecting circles.  
At first, I didn’t even see the mink, 
just the circles, which were very large 
and pink and looked like energy.
I also saw a painting called Annunciation
in which two women are talking in a bathroom
that looks just like the bathroom 
in my high school. One is wearing a blue slip 
and the other is barefoot and leaning up 
against a wall, thinking about something 
the blue slip woman has just told her.

Later I told the story of the man
losing his pants on the train to a woman.
That time I told it this way: I was frightened.
Because exposing the body can be an act
of violence. Because he was barely aware 
that his body was something he still lived inside. 
I know the man meant no harm, 
he meant nothing at all, I should just be sad 
for him, which I was and am. 
But I live inside a series of circles, 
so many you might not see me at first,
or think it’s my story at all.

LAURA READ

Laura Read is the author of Dresses from the Old Country (BOA, 2018), Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (Floating Bridge Press, 2011). She served as poet laureate for Spokane, Washington, from 2015-2017 and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.