I love the word emergency.
Its redness, its lack of eventuality, its flash
and crime. Its brothers—burn and rope.
I love the way humans startle,
the jerk back of the body, the lunge forward.
No sideways movements
come with emergency. No rhythmic beat or brush
of drum begins it.
Always the rigid riot.
Sometimes a pall of silence
covers the body
so it looks like the silvery sheet,
tissue light, tissue thin, is far less
than volcanic.
Emergency—
I like the evenness of its four syllables,
how it takes too long
to say it. By the time you say fire,
the house is rubble.
By the time you say smoke,
the sparrow, the tit-willow—
are hollowed out, featherless.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 6.
Doris Ferleger is a winner of the New Letters Poetry Songs of Eretz Prize, Montgomery County Poet Laureate Prize, Robert Fraser Poetry Prize, and the AROHO Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among others. She is the author of three full volumes of poetry: Big Silences in a Year of Rain (finalist for the Alice James Books/Beatrice Hawley Award), As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, as well as a chapbook entitled When You Become Snow. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, Delmarva Review, Euphony, Good Works Review, L.A. Review, Poet Lore, Whistling Shade, and South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a PhD in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based therapy practice in Wyncote, PA.
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