It’s Tough to See Venice from a Cartwheeling Bus Alexander Hughes The weathermen called for a mild dusting, and I’m writing a poem, trying to write a poem, thinking about writing a poem, but twenty minutes after our bus is due, the night turns against us like the hand of an angry god, a squall of whistling white bullets exploding across creation, sucking the last lingering warmth violently from the earth, boiling us all instantly frozen at the bus shelter that suddenly isn’t, a mad sudden yelping scrambling for cover, behind garbage cans and thin divider walls and each other, our world shrunk to a shaken snow globe, claustrophobic and sickly-lit in the flickering sodium lights, two dozen strangers huddled together, shivering, shaking, shaking hands, sharing coats and hats, wary but weary, and everyone agrees, it never gets like this in Seattle, there must be some mistake, but an hour after our bus is due, a different bus pulls in like a holocaust survivor and jack-knifes elegantly into a fence, the driver pours himself out into the cold, borrows a cell phone to call in his immediate resignation, and as the temperature nears zero-degrees Kelvin, the absolute freezing point of all subatomic matter, Manastash 2013
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