I am not a melodramatic person.
-Anne Carson

Autumn underway: a sun-drenched error,
sideways light: postmeridian rippling 
the field: preteen girls playing soccer

in summer’s hangover: everything 
cusped. When you drive me to the train 
you say you’d miss my hands the most. 

I say I think it’d be my face, but
you counter, Anyone can see your face. 
Hands mean you really know someone. 

Last night I rushed to the station
and rode the train westward, 6:39 pm 
in September, outside its tempered glass 

a fresco of nightfall: tangerine into grainy 
peony turned ashed lavender, then 
blue as a closed eyelid. I know

I can be exhausting. It must get old, 
my tendency to see a northeastern sunset 
and claim it backlit childhood. Forgive me 

for crying at your little sister’s pizza party, 
crying in St. Mark’s shadow, crying 
on railways and on Tuesdays, over 

the floodplains of our anatomies. 
Like this late season, I am loath to go—
just another common phenomenon saying 

I am so afraid to lack you. Waiting 
on the Metro-North for the 6:09 pm train 
to take me back the way I came, I hangnail 

in the cuticle of this manicured town. I pale 
on the platform, the paper moon holepunched
from upstate dreamscape where I sheltered,

making home of your home. Your 
sternum, your hair comb, your hair soft 
against my combing fingers 

lost to static, caesura between day and 
night. Such ordinary passage, getting 
to    from, how I step into the car and

blood beating at my temples traverses 
the skull. Stupid veins, so naive 
and tributary. Longing to arrive at the place 

where they empty. Does a river know 
when it’s only a place for crossing? Once
a writer told me that too many participles

are dangerous, potentially paralyzing, 
giving the sense that somewhere
action is happening but never happens,

yet the train is tunneling 
into this brick-lain arch, an inflection 
point, maybe, of the slow grief  

when a thing goes from going to gone, and
sweet sweetness?      my only love? 
— surely by now. 

Hannah Matheson is an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University, where she is a reader and assistant social media editor for the Washington Square Review. Previously awarded scholarships to attend The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, Hannah’s work has appeared in The Dartmouth and Four Way Review.

Alyson Vega is a fiber artist from New York City with a BA in Japanese Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University. After 22 years of working as a teacher, and as part of her recovery from brain surgery, Vega turned exclusively to her art practice. Since 2013, Vega has been part of Fountain House, a studio and gallery space for ‘artists living with mental illness’, where she regularly exhibits her work.

Vega’s first solo show, Project Room, was at White Columns in 2016.
https://www.fountainhousegallery.org/gallery/mission