This isn’t the sleek Acela.
It’s rickety, with green peeling paint,
nine hours jostling in a swaying car
across Java, my seventy-year-old husband,
our three young children, and me,
windows greasy, loud music blaring—
Hey I love you Hey I love you Hey I love you
in Bahasa Indonesia,
trying to keep our distance—
the only Westerners, no shared language,
fears of uncleanliness,
but men, women and children press against us,
our blue-eyed baby babbling,
captivating everyone,
and soon we’re babbling too, singing along,
swaying to the music like sea waves,
as we float on our little family raft
in an ocean of friendliness,
as smiling food vendors enter,
offering peanut sauce, chicken satay on little sticks,
sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves,
sliced mango, creamy black tea,
as outside, water buffaloes pull plows
all day long in endless neon green rice fields,
as inside, we’re all singing the same song.

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Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She’s won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor's Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, and in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

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