Night Train
- Chautauqua Journal
- Nov 20
- 2 min read
Marjorie Maddox
from Wild and Tame
No matter the neighborhood,
you find me, your rough song of clacks
inches above the bed I’ve hauled
from trailer to condo to suburb
where all my dreams remain the same,
hobo-style hopping into your wide-open
rusted cars that hum and thump past the horizon
into a country not here. Listen
to the way your voice calls me at 3:00 AM
to read your faraway moving graffiti,
to memorize your landscapes of what is passing by.
But now I am dreaming of who I am here
in this neighborhood that is just tracks to you,
tracks, and more tracks,
a blur that, finally, never answers
such urgent whistles, “Wake! Rise! Go!”
Image © Rayiddin
Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence, and Professor Emerita of English at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published seventeen collections of poetry—including Seeing Things (Wildhouse 2025) and Hover Here (forthcoming Broadstone 2026), as well as the ekphrastic collaborations Small Earthly Space (Shanti Arts, 2025), with photographer Karen Elias, and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (Shanti Arts 2023), with her artist daughter Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. Maddox also has published a story collection, five children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005) and Keystone Poetry (co-editor w/Jerry Wemple, PSU Press 2025). She is the great-grandniece of Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball. Her middle-grade biography, A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment, will come out this November from Sunbury Press.