The Innisfree Poetry Journal

www.innisfreepoetry.org

by Phillip Calderwood

NEAR MISSES

The months without treatment for my malformed heart,

A shunt at one and again at ten,

The accident on Hesperian, when we hit a hatchback,

And more surgery at eighteen—such a mishmash of arteries,

Clotted blood, and lungs heavy with fluid.

That dream of the masked tribesman who plunged a spear in my throat—

Then the fall at school, down eleven concrete steps,

The punk who punched me to the ground and kept kicking,

The flight I booked in September 2001,

And the Continental that ripped through the crosswalk.

I was listening to songs of train wrecks, of Georgie, Casey,

And that treacherous grade between Lynchburg and Danville,

When two trains crashed on the line I take, killing nine, injuring eighty.