The Fool's World

All These People
 poem by Isabel Hoin

  From the Archive of Saint Augustine's Magazine
 Volume 3, No. 1 (2024).

 I have to travel 88 minutes to get to my one comfort space
through a few lights– green/yellow, red/green, yellow/red, to feel

I’m back– back alive, back together, back in our space,
together. Together here are hundreds of other people,

here with us, huddling beside each other in their together
-ness to block out the coldness of them, coldness in them, cold-

ness around them, but I only see and feel you, my lost
brother, my long-lost brother. You, an inanimate object

to many, give me back my light. It returns each time
with the same movement, same path, same turns the wheels

below me move. It leads me to you every time; I’m never alone
as long as I visit you. You wait for me patiently to return

to your place, to this silly plot, while I wait an eternity
to finally see you as more than a gray stone.

Isabel Hoin (she/her) is a current graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she majored in English, Creative Writing. She now works at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, VA, teaching people
of all ages the art of poetry. She will be attending Old Dominion University as a Perry Morgan fellow in their MFA program this upcoming fall. Her work is already in or is forthcoming in Girls Right the World, Loud Coffee Press, and Saint Augustine's Magazine.