Catching the Send-Off Train

By Melanie Faith

A work of imagination and heart, Melanie Faith’s Catching the Send-Off Train traces the impacts war has on the family left behind. With the lightest of touches, Faith’s poems tell intimate stories of separation, remembrance, and return. Each short vignette adds another layer to the narrative and to an understanding of her characters. The collection delivers the emotional accumulation of these well-rendered moments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordrunner eChapbooks
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310810114

Melanie Faith

Melanie Faith holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, NC. Her writing has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She is a writing tutor at a college prep. high school in Pennsylvania and an online creative writing instructor. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in the past year at Vermillion Literary Project, Linden Avenue, Aldrich Press, The New Writer, Foliate Oak, and Origami Poems Project, and her work is forthcoming from Star 82 Review and Words Dance (Summer 2013).

Book preview

Catching the Send-Off Train

Poems

by Melanie Faith

Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

(an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014

Cover photo by Alfred Eisenstadt, April 1943

(first printed in LIFE, February 14, 1944)

Several women run alongside a train blowing kisses that break against the windows.

— Allison Benis-White

CONTENTS

Platform

Telephone Operator

Justice of the Peace

Where There’s Smoke There’s Breakfast

Life Line

Floating

Charlie

Fragments, Sent

Red, White, Green

Pauline to Edgar

I’m not saying it’s the same.

Taking off His Ring, Part One

Edgar to Pauline

Tattered Mosaic

And Sometimes a Boy Needs a Father

Edgar

Taking off His Ring,