Marsha Barber’s third poetry book, Love You to Pieces, was published by Ottawa’s Borealis Press in 2019. Her work has appeared in such periodicals as FreeFall, Literary Review of Canada, The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly and The Walrus. Marsha is on faculty at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Taking His Hand After the driver announces a delay because there’s been “a personal injury at track level” those of us in the subway car look down will not meet one another’s eyes. Personal injury at track level, says the old man next to me, in the black beret, There’s a certain poetry to that. Even though we’re late for appointments, the jumper is now “late” in that other awful sense. And when we’re eventually back at work, drinking coffee, taking minutes, drawing pie charts, the jumper is just one more thing that happened that day, perhaps not even the most memorable. So why does he come to me in my dreams that night, his hopeful hand reaching up from the track. © Marsha Barber, 2020
