Note: The following piece was accepted for an anthology (the project never reached publication) in which all of the selections would take inspiration from Ezra Pound’s two-line Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro” (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd, / Petals on a wet, black bough.”).

Other People

Furtive cross-car assessment:                                10
Skewed mannequins, communal autism;
The sway of the seatless–Geiger counter needles.
So many faces, but how many facades?
Which rider, already dead inside,
Plots to play conductor, intends                                5
To reroute everyone into inferno?
Insecurity haunts worse than any apparition.
These days, trust only in the fact that
No matter what, you’ll never know.                           1