My name is Podrigol Tumor and once I was on the underground train in London and in the

underground in London people don't talk at all really and somebody in the middle of

this carriage was sitting and was crying and it was obvious but there was a kind of a

respect and an awkwardness and trying not to draw too much attention to it. Eventually

one person next to the person who was crying put a Kleenex on her knee and that was taken

with gratitude. Everything was done in silence and then the person on the other side offered

a peppermint and somehow the humor of it all and the tenderness and the languagelessness

of everything combined to make that a moment that I've never forgotten. Reading Solan

in a subway station by Carolina Ibeid I can't say whether the other commuters stand

arrested by this music, the accordion player near the vendor's hutch but it comes toward

me, words sorrow, drafting through the high-line shell of myself in thought. Reconstruction

delays, the stench of piss and nothing weather-shaped, nothing ocean-spun. Steam hammers and dynamite

tunneled out a labyrinth, this inner ear where ira doesn't linger. Unbeautiful in its

vaults and watt-hours its generations of mice, the wall is dinged and saccharin glazed

where he plays in a suit. I follow his fingers minuscule work over a column of keys drawing

out and in the melody of that pleated lung. It lifts away from us, climbing the stairs past

horse patrols and jewelry hawks, past scaffolding and saplings blown like tonnefants, past fruit

stands, placards and idle greyhounds, the corridors of silver buildings, the thonger with

silver veins, it lifts away because it seeks the high-loan son. Admit his music, cause

of all, it is handmade. This poem is an amazing gathering together of the experience of reading

something while you're in a subway station. At the same time, taking in so much else

that's happening, the locale that's described in this poem is so extraordinary. Reconstruction

...