Ghost Tracks by Eric Fisher Stone

Urban legend assumes that in 1930s San Antonio, Texas, a train collided with a school bus, killing 10 children. Visitors still park at the alleged crash site to sprinkle baby powder on their cars. Some report seeing small handprints on their powdered vehicles.

Children played “I spy with my little eye”

but none saw the train punch the bus.

Side panels punctured like a stabbed can of beans,

ragged swords of glass and steel splitting

apart its guts, still-birthing children on gravel

as the train gored deeper in the wounded bus

like an enraged industrial bull, hellsmoke

sneezed from his chimney, blowlamps of his eyes

blazing into night thronged with milksnakes,

raccoons shocked by the booming slap of metal

until nothing but silence,

the children seeing their misted spirits seethe

like fog from their bones and new wispy hands

but this was their final hallucination

before death, no fingerprints pressing

from their remains and no afterlife,

the world holding the dead inside her,

the violent deliverance of flowers,

holy Earth twisting her blue speck, the only home

for birds and falling in love

where the dead aren’t ghosts but grass

and bottleflies greener than Elysium

while the children saw for their last hot second

grackle-peppered powerlines swaying

with lightning current, the great horned owl

roosting on a live oak outside Boerne,

the Milky Way splashed over Fredericksburg,

one millisecond slowing down to drink

with their vision the world’s radiance,

a grand procession of snails purpling eyestalks,

the children happy their final blip is heaven

beyond time they’ve inherited, the universe

unfettered from flesh like a soul

and the unchained rainbow spumes free.

Eric Fisher Stone is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas. He received his MFA in creative writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His first full length collection of poems, “The Providence of Grass” was published by Chatter House Press in 2018. His second collection of poems, “Animal Joy” is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2021.