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--- N A T E C H I N E N a. Trenton nothing to hold. nowhere to go. this is Trenton -- on the platform, a father smokes with his two teenage daughters, both girls trying not to look impossibly young -- heavy Eagles jackets, silver hoop earrings, ponytails peeking through matching baseball caps. In Trenton, Christmas has come and gone. snow sits heavy over this city -- rowhouses and water towers flash by, gaunt and awkward. we lurch forward. the tracks stretch on this way for miles. b. Bristol = quiet dull metal scraps jut from the snow like scabs a blank high school football field a penitentiary the Grundy Industrial & Office Complex stretches like Babel into the ashen sky at the post office, an american flag hangs, tattered, from its pole UNHAPPY WITH THAT CAR YOUR DRIVING? Go to Northeast Lincoln Mercury. c. Croyden the train kicks up snowpuff and the sun emerges, cold and dizzyingly bright. on the cracked wooden platform, one patient woman, icecaked boots and the Zober Development Co. smokestacks coughing soot that settles quiltlike over the drifts. I am trying to make this a beautiful thing, the woman and her layers. She will be old soon and I can't picture her nursing a child -- I can't imagine that she has made love, I feel as if she has always stood in that exact spot: the black soot boots, the orange coatbundle hung on her frame and even this is lovely, I tell myself. In a flash, gone d. Eddington station doesn't even have a sign. e. Torresdale I like the snow on the roofs of houses in Torresdale. f. Holmesburg |
© crossconnect 1995-1998
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published in association with the
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university of pennsylvania
kelly writers house
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