from the fire

the fire girls jumped off
a factory roof to escape*
trapped over 100 others 20 years before
my mother, a millinery copyist in
another factory, could smell the smoke
whenever anyone spoke of
someone they knew...

worse than what there couldn’t ever be
anything worse... she said;

words
I walked past thorough
ignorant of the embers

long before
you fleshed out of my fantasy
and after even after

I smelled it awful
like nothing I had ever known
couldn’t get away from,
you knew instinctively, whose lungs
40 years of Pall Mall smoke blackened;

death’s crackling
I couldn’t hear in my mother’s words
or stop hearing now
blocks from where I lived...

...kept seeing that sky, crowded with so many
from so high to fall
my mother couldn’t have imagined

as flame winged
they flew down
90 years ago

how many more would fly
even further down
one at a time
slam into the earth,

couldn’t ever be anything worse...

But I know now
what you did...
there’s no bottom to anything
always

“still a down and
further still to fall and faster than i
thought...” **

twin-souled and yet
10 months before
I had---there was... urned proof,
as you talked me safely out
of lower Manhattan through our life
back to Brooklyn
loved me past mortal flesh

I didn’t even have a clue...

you were already speaking to me
from the fire.



*Triangle Factory Fire on March 25, 1911

**quote from “Liquid Jesuit” by Andrew Gettler

By Linda Lerner

From Ms. Lerner's book, Living In Dangerous Times, Presa Press (2007) , this poem has also appeared in the journal, Black Bear Review.




Linda Lerner is the author of 12 poetry collections, another is forthcoming this Spring, '09, called Something Is Burning In Brooklyn, from Iniquity Press / Vendetta Books. Her poems are published in hundreds of journals--this one, like most of her work comes out of a very personal experience, she hope others will be able to relate to. It seems her best work is drawn from some unhappiness, or in this case, tragic circumstances; the rest feels like practice, warming up for the real poems. Visit Ms. Lerner online at http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/lindalerner