In order to view this poem as the author intended it to appear, we suggest reading it on a computer screen or in the landscape orientation on your phone.

Land of the Lost
Stephen Benz

Factory noise follows him wherever
he goes, a buzz in his head long after
the safety suits are hung up for the night
and the timeclock has stamped his card.
The coffee shop waitress says something
and he just nods, always at a loss,
the harsh language, the constant buzz in his head
keeping him from understanding the here and now.
The waitress brings him unwanted bread—
bland American bread, which he did not ask for
and does not like. Every day goes like this:
work, misunderstandings, food without flavor,
more work. Letters from home worry
how he will cope with winter weather.
But when the season comes he just feels numb,
too numb to register the cold,
and even his sorrow, his longing
succumb to the numbness of routine:
train to work, safety suit, foul air,
mechanical noise, hoses, belts, gauges,
train back to the shared flat. Day in, day out.

Sometimes on the train the police scrutinize him.
Or a passenger stares intently with hateful eyes.
How tiring to always, always be suspected.
Night falls too early here. He travels through corridors
of wan light—the tenement buildings’ pallid squares,
the pale-yellow underground stations. His own ghost
rides alongside him in the pane, and beyond his phantom face
are vacant lots, railroad yards, shopping plazas, and people
fixed in place on glowing platforms,
bulky, motley clothes and frozen faces.
Nothing like the America he saw in movies long ago
mesmerized in his hometown’s sweltering makeshift theater.

When with the train’s sway he dozes,
he’s transported to the carnival dances he knew as a boy,
his family—mother, father, grandparents,
cousins, uncles, aunts—in animal masks
weaving around him until he is subsumed,
trampled in the confused quadrille.

Jarred awake by the lurching train, he finds
he has missed his stop and must descend
to a strange sector harboring some other
foreign enclave, the language, the street patterns,
the stores and their products all strange to him.
A coppery prostitute has him by the arm,
her accent too severe for him to follow.
When he can’t answer her question,
she scoffs and shoves him away.
Someone down the block shouts at him,
and he turns a corner, finds a shadow, turns
and turns again. After an hour of wandering,
penniless, he enters a tunnel under tracks
and hurries through: the reek of urine and liquor,
violent threats graffitied on the walls,
the blasting of train horns, gun shots,
and then at last the neighborhood he knows,
a street he recognizes, storefronts lettered
in his native tongue, familiar displays,
the trappings of his homeland weirdly
manifesting here, in this foul and frigid city,
his exile, his nightmare, his last-ditch hope.

—
Stephen Benz has published three books of essays, including Topographies (Etruscan Press, 2019), along with essays in New England Review, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, and Best American Travel Writing. He has also published a book of poems, Americana Motel (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.). He lives in Albuquerque, where he teaches at University of New Mexico.

Know anyone who might appreciate reading Stephen’s poem?
Why not share the link to this page?

Have you read these poems:
Peonies by Sheryl Guterl
Baby Fat by Kelly Cammack

Table of Contents