Borreliosis

by Katherine Fallon

“This is my body. It is an approaching train whistle.”
              —Heather Askeland (1981-2014)

Heather, the summer I picked
you up from the Greyhound station,
we went to the countryside for berries.
It was late in the season and it took
some looking. At home, we washed
those we found and some, fat as sated ticks,
burst in our hands. I was newly in love
and saw the mess as sordid, and apart
from you. This weekend she dropped me
off at the train station, rails I used to hop across
on the way to buy cigarettes and coffee
at all hours, and as I sat, waiting for the R5,
I read the signs, the rules, the number
for the suicide hotline, over and over,
like an obnoxious radio chorus. My train
was late. The express passed—a sound like
cookware collapsing in a cabinet—and forced
a hot wind. I thought of the berries, our hands
stained a little more purple than fresh blood,
and, years later, you, alone, waiting for a train
in nowhere, Wisconsin, where your long illness
made upright hard, corkscrew spirochetes
endless and unstoppable. You were always
patient and were done. You stepped out, made
yourself gone, became the almighty whistle.

Katherine Fallon’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Juked, Meridian, Colorado Review, Best New Poets 2019, and others. Her chapbook, The Toothmakers’ Daughters, is available through Finishing Line Press. She assists in editing Terrible Orange Review, teaches in the Department of Writing & Linguistics at Georgia Southern University, and shares domestic square footage with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.