After forty-eight hours in Pittsburgh
for a wedding spangled with nieces and nephews
and loves far more opulent than our attempts
to express them—vows, toasts, a cookie table
three tables long—we were driving back
to the airport and I was thinking about the aviary
and how the rainbow lorikeets were not cheeky
and the invisible cost of cages
when three things happened almost
at once: two ambulances sirened by,
my phone informed us: accident ahead,
and traffic braked to a standstill. As usual
I remembered the long stretch
of intestine dashed across the asphalt,
the shock of it,
looking uncurled
from our anatomy kids’ book with clear pages,
turn a page and a different cross section appeared.
After the intestine, a hand.
The rest of the body covered by a clean white sheet.
That person dead now for decades.
And I did what I’ve done for decades: imagine
whoever’s at the snarled heart of the traffic jam
alive, the interior of an ambulance lit up
with the hardworking love of competent hands.
Then I get all woo-woo
and send the person a golden glowing river
of love and healing, like afternoon summer
sun reflected in the mirrors of a million disco balls
but in one glorious stream poured out
on one body, splashed with my words: Stay alive!
You are loved! Live! Live for those who love you!
And I imagine the person unfettered by injury,
floating without gravity in the golden glow
until it’s absorbed into their organs and skin
and they wake up whole.
Over-the-top, I know. But I do this,
like buckling a seatbelt,
every time.
–
Heather Jessen has poems appearing or forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Pangyrus, Poetry South, and elsewhere. A former resident of Australia, she lives in Connecticut and can be sporadically found on Instagram at @maxhj1 and X at @hjessenwrites.