Trespasser Strike

January 2026

The Amtrak announcer calls it a trespasser strike.
Someone stepped out of their skin
into the weather speed created.
In the seats behind me, someone mourns
his dinner reservation, a woman scrolls
through real estate. Suspended
between stations, for hours we do
what Americans do best,
make the time after tragedy pass
as quick as possible, fill its hollow
with protocol and shopping.
All conductors hit someone
eventually, a young uniformed man
tells a passenger, but this
is his first time. In my seat,
I mouth the Kaddish, maybe
because the syllables conjure
a cast—of sand, bronze,
mud?—from which the stranger
seems to rise. I invite their unknown name
to wander in my mouth, among
words I know like my own face
yet which turn from me. Emergency
whistles through our warm impatience:
men with radios, reflectors, holstered guns.
Brightly they redraw the yellow lines
that transform victims into perpetrators
and back again. They inspect machinery,
take measurements, a pulse.
While we wait, rows of glowing windows
in southbound double-decker trains
are a thousand open eyes watching the country
scrolling by, deciding who is blameless,
who was on the line.
Here, I tell the stranger,
come walk the map of after
I’ve been a lifetime making with my lips
and teeth and tongue. It’s not a place,
exactly, but a way somewhere.
Wheels turning in miles of track
that were tied to the earth
one by one, by hand.

Leah Falk is the author of the poetry collections Other Customs and Practices (Glass Lyre Press) and To Look After and Use (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere, and she’s received support from the Peleh Fund, Yetzirah, Vermont Studio Center, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Originally from Pittsburgh, she lives in Philadelphia, where by day she works for Penn Live Arts, the performing arts center at the University of Pennsylvania.