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Chauna Craig
Boxcar Willie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
This train whistle is more a horn. Long and loud and musical—blown into the wind before a storm.
Through town, the heavy mechanical whining wheels, their bass rhythm thumping through my walls, pulsing
up the soles of my feet. I lean into the feeling of sound. How my blood wants to follow and hop an open
car and be taken…somewhere.
The Railway Killer followed a line in the late 90s that took him within yards of a house where I slept. It
wasn’t my house, though my cousin had once lived there. In Arkansas, expect that. My lover lived there.
The horn never blew, the trains just rolled through. Expect that too. That summer I screamed when a
Junebug knocked the screen. I screamed and called for a man because something deep inside me believed: if
men could kill, they could also save.
It was only a Junebug, sometimes called a May beetle. The neighbors had a pit fire, our windows open to the
charred night.
I have wanted to be taken. Silent whistle to a Grim Reaper in the form of a Junebug batting my screen day
and night until the wire starts to unravel.
Present perfect. I have wanted.
In this perfect present, the train whistle blows forever. A loneliness I cannot capture and that cannot capture
me.
Present perfect continuous: you haven’t been listening. And so, I’m tense.
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