Inventory of a Night Train

The corridor hums like a held note, windows braided with black fields, a lone vending machine swallows quarters, returns a constellation of wrappers.

I count the ordinary miracles: paper tickets soft as moth wings, the conductor's lantern of breath, the way the rails rehearse our names.

Outside, a river keeps a silver ledger, each bridge a quickened heartbeat, pine silhouettes kneel and rise, and somewhere a fox pauses to listen.

Sleep comes in increments, a careful clerk, stamping the inside of my wrist; I wake with the taste of iron and rain, arriving not somewhere, but changed.