My voyage box, you are the sway
of night-cars trans-Canada, glass-domed
viewing-rooms, silent mountains
leaning over windows, fir trees
shawling their branches close enough
to feel my melancholy rush
through me like an out-breath.
Rivers of nourishment, a moose lowers
its head to drink.

I love that you let me shelter
a miniature locomotive inside you
as an empty box signifies
loneliness under cover of twilight.
I glued a painting on your lid, long train
approaching, engine wraps
its coupler around a necklace of cars.
I’ve saved you all these years,

How many times have I derailed
since your birth in me,
the woods of my street a mystery
I roamed, searching for home.
I couldn’t find you yesterday,
losing things so often now, but you emerged
from a hiding place ready to travel
the tracks again, your moons
rounding their curve. I’ve held you
at a station in my mind all this time,
pulling me to the next stop
and the next.

^^^

Phyllis Klein is a psychotherapist and poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The New Verse News, Sweet, 3Elements, I-70, The Minnesota Review, and Swwim Everyday, among many others. She was a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. Her book, The Full Moon Herald, from Grayson Books (2020) won poetry finalist from the Eric Hoffer Book Award, 2021.  During the Pandemic she started a reading called Poets in Conversation. 

Photograph by the author.