Anne Harding Woodworth

Accident on the Red Line, Remembered
by Anne Harding Woodworth

“. . . and one train is on top
of the other train.”

—DC Metro report, June 22, 2009

It happened in a speed of whistles,
when the brakes gave out

and the driver couldn’t force
the screech to warn of impact

before the thrust of a coupling
never meant to be,

fast and sudden mounting,
and bloody bodies squirmed

desperate to find an opening
through steel and broken glass,

to plunge calamity into comfort
of a fecund summer, suburban green,

where insects flew one atop the other,
dragon flies in flagrante—

over wildflowers along the tracks
that knifed a route down into town,

and in time went underground.

 

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 16, Issue 2.

Anne Harding WoodworthAnne Harding Woodworth’s fifth collection of poetry is Unattached Male (Poetry Salzburg, 2014). She divides her time between a cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina and her home in Washington, D.C., where she is on the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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