I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our

living room like uninvited guests at a party

 

waiting with my wife in case her heart attack

arrives before the ambulance does, each man

 

scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might

burst from a bookcase, can’t unsee them monitoring

 

the way she probes her neck and shoulder and jaw

for a sign of the fuses a coronary lights in a woman’s

 

body, the young one unpacking the defibrillator,

flattening the blue patches that attach to the chest.

 

How strange that pain has a photographic memory.

Unbidden image imbued with new life. The past

 

always hijacking the present, my wife ever lifted

into the ambulance, the door closing between us.

 

Ken Hines

Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that take getting through to people who may not be listening. His poetry has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, and Dunes Review, among others. You’ll find his essays in The Millions, Philosophy Now, and Barrelhouse. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife Fran.