There is a river made of cars here. The girl searches for herself on it, knowing it isn’t a mirror she’s looking through but a window, knowing it’s bad luck to shatter something. It could be beautiful if it weren’t so sad, or maybe it’s sad because it’s beautiful, this knowing that you can’t swallow everything. Maybe someone makes diagonal cuts onto unbaked bread, an imprint without separation. Or maybe it’s a pink house on a hill: tall, old, unburnt. Unburnt, but the roof is caving in. That is the way we decay: slowly at first, and then all at once. She misses the way she could see the whole world from that bedroom, the way she could see the tracks laid down like sideways ladders, as if everything is a climb or a descent and therefore cannot be simple. The tracks descend on a flattened path and she can’t see herself in a bedroom window, she can’t see anything; just the smell of burnt rubber. A reminder of why she writes poetry on trains. On the phone, he asked her how high they stack the cargo up north. You know, the passenger trains pay the cargo trains to use the tracks. They’ll go out of business paying to move people. It’s different in Europe, he said. Better. Moving this fast is strange because there are no choices. Dying is strange because rigor mortis starts in your eyelids, a stiffening from the top down. Oh but that’s how you came into this world, head to toe. You should leave starting with the balls of your feet, a completion. All of this and then a highway running parallel. There was a choice, once.