appealing

The Maynard
Fall 2017

Christopher Levenson

Ghost Train

From the years just after the War I remember them
in the fairgrounds of battered South Coast resorts
or at the far end of piers, their clunky darkness
competing with Wurlitzers and the slot machines
that told your penny fortune or let you almost see
what the butler saw. Outdated Gothic bric-a-brac,
witches, skeletons, bloody tendrils of flesh
oozing from canvas walls—a makeshift horror
for those of us too young to have known the real thing.
Those who have never set foot in the past would not understand
how the eight-track massacre’s caught in perpetual motion,
how the fairground music will never stop,
how the ghost trains still run on time