Freight Train
For Elizabeth Cotten (1893 -1987) American blues and folk musician, singer, and songwriter.
At a gas station in Malta, Angelo fingerpicks
that song as the boys eat ricotta pastizzi
and Ruth restrings her banjo
and Romey plays at hairdressers, her cool
little hands wrapping my newly
shaved head in silk
scarves until I resemble
an overpriced Easter egg
on sale in May while Angelo sings
your line about being buried deep
in Chestnut Street to hear the number nine
go rolling by Chapel Hill where you first
played that tune upside down
on your brother’s banjo
now it’s a hundred years later and
five thousand miles away, thumbed on
someone else’s guitar and your song
is lifting me onto a freight train, your fourth
finger bending that note blue as my skin
quivers, my cells pause and I am
plucked out.
Emma Gawlinski grew up in Norfolk but now lives in Barcelona, where she teaches, writes and plays saxophone in her band Los Boozan Dukes. Poems were recently published in the American Journal of Nursing, in Under Your Pillow poetry anthology (Victorina press) and Mslexia magazine