KATHLEEN HELLEN

waiting for the southbound 

            For Michelle Alyssa Go

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Lie flat—curl up in a little ball

find a hole that is your proper place
under the tracks

before whatever happens 
chops your legs off
chops your arms
before it howls I’m God! 

It’s not true 
if you can see the lights, hear the rumble, 
if you are shaking, sweating, standing close 

the train will pull you under
its metal shoes

—the violence that forces
gets rid of you and all your kind

pushes with its hands on your shoulder
on your hip, in the small of your back 
like a lover

and so we lift our gaze 

Title taken from a line in Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb”

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I start out for the hill like late Romantic: walking to think, 
thinking to walk, the wind in my face like struggle 
always is—and relative to hills before, 

my shadow-legs inclining blunt 
asphalt. The trees at the edge knuckled—Look at us now, 
the sign for leasing says—this hill, the next the next, 
above the MLK where “squeegee boys” work 
red lights near the burned-out blocks, the windows boarded up, 
the doorways splintered. I walk the bottom 

where single moms rent shabby duplexes. Here, to pretty up, 
someone’s put geraniums in pots. Yellow flags caution not to walk 
where grass grows greener. 

Once, on a field trip climbing slag, taking in the view of the cemetery 
in North Braddock, the professor told the class the city is documentary:
The rich at the top. Polish and Italian, rising up along the rivers. Blacks 
who settled in “The Bottom” near the mill.

I climb the hill that seems impossible, following the arrow to numbered 
canopies the same stock black, the same canvas, block after block after block, 
all the way to traffic—Hello, Brook View! —though there’s no “view,” 
no brook except a stream running droughty, running past the flags 
red white and blue that fidget under scrutiny.

Here’s “Finn” scratched in cement, the past hardened, hardening 
still. A claim to immigration or an artifact of grievance, lower in a case 
of capital offenses than the house I watched all summer 
adding depth, height, seizing 

light through elegant tall windows. Today, she’s in her wide-
brimmed hat again, digging-planting-overtaking, the landscape shoveled 
out to exploit the view of white azaleas.

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