Boston, 9/11

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Spring 2003 by Wehle, Ellen

I

I want to keep my cool but realize on the train

I'm crying. My towering office block deserted

when I got there, even security gone, an email:

Everyone go home, spend time with your family.

And here the Doomsday we have always known,

in the back of our hearts, lay waiting...this image

of ourselves falling 100 stories, human Lucifers

plunging match-head first. A whole city emptied

that day, thinking We're next. I say again, a city.

Trains packed and silent as cattle cars, like every

disaster man's ever made, body to body to body.

II

In Manhattan, Andrea is not only alive but angry

she can't get into her art studio, barricaded by fire

trucks and traffic. Don't you know I grip the phone

people are dying? but Andrea may be the only one

in America to feel no fear. Since her recovery, she

sculpts figures in fragments flying through the air,

a fingerbone, a lung - once, an entire wall of eyes

I stood helplessly beneath while she waited for my

judgment - and it occurs to me. Yes, she knows.

III

Deserted. Images of ourselves. Match-head first.

Ellen Wehle is a performance poet who is featured regularly at bookstores, colleges, and the Boston and Worcester poetry festivals. Her poems are upcoming in Runes, FIELD, the Christian Science Monitor, Poet Lore, Texas Review, Westerly, and Terra Incognita. She lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts, with her husband and two stepchildren.