Wait It Out by Linda McCullough Moore

April waiting
I intend to spend in a bus station
in Falls Creek, Pennsylvania
where in 1956 my aunt Delores

- no, I didn't like her -
bought me peach pie, a piece

- yes, homemade - expecting
I'd be nice to her.
Because.

The waiting room, old then,
before these sixty years
clock-ticked, drop-kicked
my life. Gray lint, gum wrappers
bussed here from America,
something rumpled in the corner,
a ragged shirt a man from Lithuania
worked eleven hours for, wrinkled
tickets, a carry-all no one has opened
since the war before the war.

The ticket window's closed.
The tattered magazines named
Look and Life and Cosmopolitan.
(Why Men Pay for Love, p. 17.)
My mother will not wonder where I am.
The air is cold, old gasoline perfumes
rust on the radiator. No sound arrives,
no hiss, exhaust, no bus’s exhalation.
I'm seventy-two years old.
I still have homework due on Monday.

My childhood wasn't much.
It's all I think about.