Talking of clichés, couples meeting in train stations is one of the most well know, and ‘Hauptbahnhof’ by Joanna Walsh gives a wildly new take on it. Berlin Hauptbahnhof is a whole sterile ecosystem, a walled city laced with tracks and it was the first monster train station I visited. I was at the age where I could just look up at the departures board and pick an interesting sequence of letters that also happened to be a place I could visit. I ended up travelling to Bonn, but Walsh’s narrator is forever waiting for someone to arrive.
First published as a chapbook, ‘Hauptbahnhof’, 3:AM Press, 2013 and collected in Fractals, 3:AM Press, and Worlds from the Word’s End, And Other Stories, 2017
A Personal Anthology 