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.
Phillip Calderwood's poems have appeared in The Chabot
Review, The Berkeley Text, and A Magazine of Paragraphs.He is
originally from Northern California, where he received undergraduate degrees in
English and history from UC Berkeley.He moved to Maryland in 2004, completed a master's program in
history at American University, and now works as an editor and content manager
in the District of Columbia.
