Mackenzie Hyatt

Train Car Archivists

Mackenzie Hyatt

Don’t worry, it’s the short train, coughed a bus stop mistress, a status like mine,

with her tobacco-laced Hoosier articulation, an accent falling out of fashion, it seems, replaced by whatever feels fitting.

Apparently, she used to work for the trains, just like some long-dead relative of mine

with one of the many titles of my father’s lineage and thus of my own.

The engine scream, what a century ago would be a coal-powered whistle, rattled my ribcage all the same.

The concrete platform under my toes shook in a way Indiana ground wasn’t supposed to.

(At least not before Indiana was what this ground was called.)

But the steel behemoth I expected suddenly became a gallery, and the prism of industry was shone through with a beam of light.

Every color possible compressed, though sun-bleached, in a can of spray paint spelled words and names and portraits in loopy, bubbly lettering,

and all I can do is wonder how the urbanite Van Goghs found their way to their canvases

and how it doesn’t matter to them if it’s Van Gogh like van Cough or Van Gogh like van Go

only whether or not they can climb back over the train station fence or keep pace with the crawling speed, slowly getting faster and more out of reach

and it dawned on me that whoever complains about (and underpays people to scrub) the aerosol calligraphy really doesn’t hate the art nor those creating it,

but instead despises the debate against their false idea that anything public is anyone’s property, and can never be

someone’s canvas.