Derailments

by Danielle Lea Buchanan

We slosh through crawdads in Louisiana’s mud to catch a rung. It’s past midnight and we won’t jump till Mississippi. Sadie and I train hop. “Our last time,” is said. Flattened on our backs on clanking metal between two carriages, our vertebrae fracture from cartilage like unhooked freights. The spinal cord is an alabaster railroad track of bone. Between us: a backpack full of Gewürztraminer, cork screw, enough benzodiazepine to tranquilize velocity of steel wheels. We’d heard of a juke joint deep in the Mississippi hills named Teddy’s that played authentic Delta Hill blues. On the plank, we stare at a star’s sweat in humidity, hear Spanish moss rip on chipped rust. The bottle back and forths. Our laughs exceed railway speed limits.

***

Trains fill with the unseen and go where you’re not. A metallic uncertainty travels 65 miles per hour, its blast pipe vaporizes glee toward an unknown. Pistons, axels, wheels, turnbuckles, coupling rods, cylinders, crossheads grind toward incognito, yodeling sparks because destination finally doesn’t exist in in finite locomotion when metal doesn’t possess volition. The caboose though. Is there anything sadder?

***

A train derails in the Northern Pacific. The lead locomote octaves through water in pitches of a tuba’s lowest note. The Loneliest Whale in the World’s song (at 52 hertz) stops its song to the self. Instead, it circulates repeatedly around the train as the train spiralizes into downfall. There’s a wheel’s spin in sand and the spin’s sink. Metal shrieks as coral stretch marks its body. There’s the cargo of black coal’s wheeze that exfoliates into nothingness, savagely, by salt. Rust rises like yeast on boxcar surfaces because all water Brillo pads steel. The Loneliest Whale hears this chorus: rust’s rise, metal’s pain. The train hears the whale’s love song circle around it as it sinks. The last piece of ionized roof suctions into sand. Sand faints under the train’s instinct to chug, even downward, unimpeded, in highest velocity, to where?

***

There’s no relationship more monogamous than a steel wheel and wooden rail tie. Is the wheel pulled and rail tie pushed? Say a wheel’s velocity is stalled due to a rail tie’s amputation. At night, in the hiddenness of milk thistle, metal and wood elastic themselves as far and fast as the wheel desires to turn. If the wheel is too ionized to roll, the rail tie asphyxiates itself into the softest of soil that allows the most give. Suddenly, a downhill slope is birthed for the wheel to roll. Tantric are the sex lives of metal and wood. Come night, one hears steel gasp through the Mississippi Delta, shrieking above the rail’s groan. This orgasm crushes pennies before the train collides into a couple waiting in a car on the track, idling intentionally.

***

Which illegal immigrants are lighter than iron ore, cement and quartz? See film Sin Nombre. Read Enrique’s Journey riding the Iron Worm. Mexican and Central Americans caboose toward an idea’s idea of Unitedness in America. When riding atop a boxcar, do not fall asleep. Some migrants nap on their feet, using belts or shirts to strap themselves to posts of a footplate. Others struggle to stay awake. They take amphetamines, slap their own faces. Was it in Sin Nombre? A child fell asleep while sitting up? Unwoke to death by facial blow of a tree limb? Catapulted off the boxcar roof? Masticated by wheels?

***

A train moves just slow enough for hope. A hope to jog next to, climb on, push a crying boy through a glass window that won’t be seen by its parents again, slow enough for generations to climb that rung, for strangers on roofs to hold out hands and grasp another who is pulled up bunker side, to chain a Chow Chow to the drawbar, to fuck in the gangway midnight bellows, to jump willingly under tracks that vibrate just loud enough for a hand to enter a pocket unheard and unfelt, a hand that steals years of panting toward this dream. Destination causes flesh to conflate into a metal locomotion that rocks, puffs, jerks, sways, gulps, jolts, shakes, unhooks. The Iron Worm derails 250 migrants in fields of sugarcane and barley.

***

Date: 2013. In West Bengal is an elephant province called Jalpaiguir where lies a train depot with infrastructures of wing rails, throw bars, merges and divergences into a metropolis filled with olive trees and elephant herds. Does approaching light see what’s shined on? Does luminous intensity of 200,000 candela have choice of what it sheens? It snaps through limbs of a forest before barrowing into 15 elephants. The body of one elephant was trapped between the railroad track and a bridge, and had to be cut into pieces to be removed. Did the engineer eat a blueberry muffin after 5,000 pounds of grey deflated like a silver, hairy, helium balloon into a bridge’s suspension rails? In that millisecond before collision, who closed eyes first? The train’s head lamps cry black tears of short-circuitry, then flicker into a dimmed malfunction. The brake is mute. The whistle swallows its mouth. A wheel’s rotations ravish forward in insatiable hunger as it incises the delicacy of exotic meat, as did the rescuers’ machetes.

***

Is one pulled, smashed, pushed or trampled into destiny? Do freight car bodies and bodies atop the freights rust faster in certain locales? Do axels or those axelated remember where soil is softest due to give of a track, sunken ties, rail bed sog or moss marathoning up head lamps? Does collective movement shatter injustice’s embalmment? Being still very fast and loudest on an empty track. Who notices? The caboose turns its head to see contractions of an animal’s existence violently convulsive in silence.

***

The herd of 15 elephants appeared to grieve for their fallen one, hanging around the bridge where it was killed. Foresters initially managed to chase them off by bursting firecrackers and shooting tranquilizer darts but the herd didn’t go far and refused to leave. Elephants often return to the site of accidents. They believe their mate is only injured and can be rescued.

***

After our last hop, Sadie would return to the West Coast to get married to a screenwriter who sold a 30-minute pilot to A&E network for $80,000. She’d marry into millionaires. This was the last time we’d see one another, I knew. We never got to pound nails out the juke joint’s flood boards in dance. We slept past Mississippi and woke to a place where light clawed into every pore.

***

Her fiancé paid for two train tickets to take us eight hours back to Louisiana from Southern Arkansas. I wondered if air feels how chugged the lost people are that tumble through it. We harmonized Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” and unpeeled thigh skin off the train’s hot metal—us unseeing but trying to decipher the impressionistic world that smeared itself under our feet. We closed our eyes. Closure doesn’t spare the luminosity so bright it electrically buzzes. We clanked back into the future. Everything soon behind us, behind us, came unhooked.

***

How long till a wheel without its wooden rail tie slowly begins again its arthritic turn on a track?

References: Miller, Daniel. “Elephants Carry Out Revenge Attacks After One of Their Herd Was Hit and Killed by a Train.” 9 Aug. 2013, http://www. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2388182/Elephants-carrying-revenge- attacks-village-herd-hit-killed-train.html. McCrum, Kirstie. “Disabled Woman Abandoned on Train in Wheelchair after Staff Forgot About Her.” 18 Apr. 2016, http://www.mirror. co.uk/news/world-news/disabled-woman-abandoned-train- wheelchair-7778471. Nozario, Sonia. “Defeated Seven Times, a Boy Again Faces The Beast.” 2 Oct. 2002, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/oct/02/world/fg-thirdsonia.

Danielle Lea Buchanan’s poetry, hybridities, collaborative art, fiction, book reviews, interviews, teaching guides and oddities have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Mid-American Review, Anomaly’s Radical: Avant Garde Poets of Color, New Orleans, Puerto del Sol, New Delta Review, Noemi Press, Psychopomp, Hobart, New York, and other elsewheres. She was shortlisted for the Master Review’s 2016 Fall Fiction.