A Cigarette Burns on the Asphalt in the Hospital Parking Lot
Half-smoked, half-alive,
blazing chemical-orange head.
Why let it burn? Why not snuff it?
The reason I’m here doesn’t matter.
Missing is the frosted pink lipstick stain on the white filter.
Indelible lip lines like a thumb print, an ID,
traces of evidence, a crime committed, arson,
the bloom of her incineration.
My mother went into her car to smoke.
You couldn’t see in.
Smoke like a passenger.
(My children are old enough to know
I’m flammable.)
We were in the center of town when the old
apartment building on Riverside and Park caught fire.
It’s impossible to describe the violence.
She took my hand, held us in place.
Aunt Doris Said Make the Fear Big
It would be no surprise if missiles, from the plural
missilia—gifts thrown by emperors to people
on the streets—will soon be aimed at the moon,
shot down, its stones used to make cities bigger.
Someone’s always deciding they need land more
than people or homes.
What walks or stands is ground
to white powder like a drug—hate’s opiate.
Doris said if you make the fear big enough
whatever you think will happen
won’t be as bad as expected.
Look into the whites of children’s eyes,
the walls they hardly knew
pressed like flowers.
I heard a eulogist at a funeral say
his fallen daughter
was as big as libraries of song.
A friend removed his brother’s urn
from its cardboard box, took
a handful of ash, tossed it over
his shoulder for luck like salt.
How big can something be once it’s gone?
Let the snow on the branch get heavy, Doris said.
Birds
with a line from Hamlet
Sparrows came to America on ships to work, replace
the birds and animals who once ate pests but were murdered
or displaced by lands cleared when the first factories were built.
In Dhaka, cracks appeared in a garment factory’s walls.
The boss said, Work. The building collapsed. Buried workers drank
urine to survive in the rubble. Bits of fast fashion covered the dead.
When the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was on fire, workers
went up in smoke, others jumped from windows. Sometimes nothing
carries us. Kate Leone and Rosaria Maltese, the youngest, fourteen, died.
Once, I looked out my children’s bedroom window
and saw men and women in good suits jump from the burning
Towers, arms flailing, legs cycling.
I study history, shorn truths recounted in my old threadbare
classrooms’ texts, held by unruly dates and definitions, hungry for crumbs.
There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
O Ophelia, there is no providence in labor’s coin.
Only kings and presidents, owners and fathers.
But I think you knew that on the way to the brook.
Hospital-Issued Plastic Bag for Patient Belongings
Big enough to fit a winter coat, men’s size 12s,
wallet, the clothes he wore in the ambulance.
We all have them in the Care Unit’s waiting
room— a tableau of chemical white hospital-
branded bags, logo like the dull, familiar face
of a neighbor, tightly knotted. Vending machine,
unmanned reception desk, vinyl furniture, floor,
wallpaper— everything beige. We wait hemmed
by time’s thrift. Disposable gloves, syringes, cannula,
tubing, monitors— the bags are only one symptom—
paradox of the polymer world of a hospital, landfill
for the sick, where physicians vow First, do no harm.
Decay, 1981
Every train starts in a tunnel before departing. Every window of every train reflects the people
on it. My face looks back at me. It is not hyperbole to say I am surprised to see myself. The car smells of commuter cocktails, cigarettes, and newsprint. A young man, seated across from me, about my age, faces forward, then turns away, corkscrewing his body toward his reflection, eyes locking onto something I cannot see. His mouth forms a circle I pray into. Years later, I stream
a movie about zombies on a train and remember him and my prayer, unanswered. Unlike
in the movie, there’s no hero on the train to rescue me from the dead. The young man’s eyes glide slightly to the left, align with mine, window to window, reflection to reflection. The darkness of his mouth I enter is mine. I am dead for you, Mother. I am dead for you. He nods, Yes, as if I’d spoken out loud. The conductor stops at my seat, asks for my ticket. Punches it.
H.E. Fisher is the author of the collection STERILE FIELD (Free Lines Press, 2022) and chapbook JANE ALMOST ALWAYS SMILES (Moonstone Arts Center Press, 2022). H.E.’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Psaltery & Lyre, DMQ Review, Ligeia Magazine, Broadsided Press, and Whale Road Review, among other publications. H.E. was awarded City College of New York’s 2019 Stark Poetry Prize and has received nominations for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize, and is a recipient of the Poets Afloat residency. H.E. is a writing coach and editor, and currently lives in the Hudson River Valley.