Walking Home
The girl walking home alone
doesn’t know what to do
about the stranger who calls her name
He claims he has a gun
His knowing her name is a gun
He blocks her way
Rail track chain-link fence no-parking sign
It’s like that test she had in school yesterday
having to choose which animal doesn’t belong
She guessed it was the cow This girl
knows nothing of farms On her left
the empty tennis club
In front the man
who snarls he will kill her
Let me see the gun in her piccolo voice
A train rushes by
If she were in it
her life would be different
The world is full of noise
Weeds cigarette butts rusted car locked shed
She runs
She doesn’t know if he can
keep up He’s too old to catch her
He screams again I’ll kill you
She doesn’t look back
Susana H. Case is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, Erasure, Syria, from Recto y Verso Editions, and Drugstore Blue, from Five Oaks Press, as well as four chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press in Poland. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City.