They are standing together at the station. It would seem their lives are traveling in the same direction. But this is not that story. You could probably guess how long they’ve been at each other’s throats. They wanted to be joyful, but happiness eluded them. So this is their good-bye. Suddenly, he vanishes. (He is no longer on stage in this reenactment.) She is seen alone in compartment C, Car 293, wearing a wide-brim hat, reading a book about the artist, Edward Hopper.
In the next scene, a strange woman enters the compartment, holding a whip and a pair of golden handcuffs. She carries a Louis Vuitton train case, imprinted with letters on their sides, upside down on their heads, odd sizes and shapes, a calligraphy cascade of S’s and M’s. Aimez-vous bondage? she asks. The woman in the wide-brim hat would prefer that the stranger return to the pages of the bodice ripper from whence she came. How to get the genie back in the bottle? She asks the conductor. He smiles, waves his baton, and Mahler appears, in the wrong story, having just completed his Resurrection. He is traveling to the funeral of a friend who died in Venice, unaware that he is on a train to Chicago. Aimez-vous Brahms? asks the whip woman.
Wide-brim is trying to get to the next chapter, but the compartment is too crowded with this annoying cast of characters. She closes the book, prepares for her future on the Lake Shore Limited, a divorced woman, still beautiful, frozen in time. She turns toward her new life, accompanied by Mahler’s Adagio. Slowly she reaches for the golden handcuffs.
About the author:
I am a former Nicholson Fellow at Smith College, University Fellow at Cornell, and publishing executive with McGraw-Hill and HarperCollins book publishers.
My work is widely published in literary magazines and journals and has also been cited and quoted in Literary Magazine Review. Publications include: The New York Times, Many Mountains Moving, North Atlantic Review, Bayou, Connecticut Review, Denver Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Broome Review, Sanskrit, Cairn, California Quarterly (CQ), The Cape Rock, Cottonwood, Drumvoices Revue, Eclipse, Epicenter, Fulcrum: An Annual Of Poetry And Aesthetics, Gargoyle, George Washington Review, The Gihon River Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, International Poetry Review, Iodine Poetry Review, Karamu, KNOCK, The Madison Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Minnetonka Review, Monkey Puzzle Press, New Delta Review, Nimrod International, Pebble Lake Review, Potomac Review, Quercus Review, Red Rock Review, Rhino, The Saint Ann’s Review, Salamander, Soundings East, The South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Visions International, Whiskey Island, The Worcester Review, and Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, among many others.
I am the author of Augustine’s Brain – The Remix, a chapbook, and coauthor of the volume, Edge by Edge (Toadlily Press). A chapbook, A Premise of Blue, is forthcoming. My work is featured in The Best Of Toadlily Press: New And Selected Poems (Fall, 2011). In the past three years, I’ve been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize.
Gladys Justin Carr with her collaborator, "Mikey."
Gladys Justin Carr was a Nicholson Fellow at Smith College and a University Fellow at Cornell before dropping out of Academia to make mischief in an Alternate Reality. She quit her day job as a book publishing executive to write full time. Her work has appeared in over eighty publications and has been quoted in Literary Magazine Review. She is the author of a chapbook, Augustine’s Brain—the Remix, and coauthor of the volume, Edge By Edge. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work is featured in the volume, The Best of Toadlily Press: New and Selected Poems, just published. She is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World, probably because she is a renowned chocoholic.
