Molly Fisk | Rattle: Poetry

Molly Fisk

PARTICULATE MATTER

If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads.

Melted dashboards and tail lights, oil pans, gas tanks, window glass, seat belt clasps.

The propane tanks in everyone’s yards, though we didn’t hear them explode.

R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store’s plastic letters in puddled

colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets.

The laundromat’s washers’ round metal doors.

But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library—everything they contained.

How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky:

how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild

hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final

cries, and our neighbors: so many particular, precious, irreplaceable lives that despite

ourselves we’re inhaling.

—from Poets Respond
November 25, 2018

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Molly Fisk: “So many of us live near enough to Paradise, CA to have been under the pall of smoke its burning created. I’m in Nevada City, a Sierra foothills town equally likely to burn, equally hard to evacuate. Like many others in CA, we were wearing N95 masks and staying indoors, and talking to each other about what was in this particulate matter. A phrase we didn’t think of much ten years ago, and now everyone knows.” (web)

Molly Fisk is the guest on Rattlecast #61! Click here to watch …

Molly Fisk

VIOLENCE FRACTAL

First it’s locations you’ve never heard of, then far-away places

you haven’t been. Then countries you’ve traveled to, but not

that city, and not in a long time. Slowly, a tulip unfurling red petals,

it’s Paris, Rio, Toronto. And Florida, where your grandmother lived

and you flew for a visit, age 12. Frogs on the window screen croaking

all night. Las Vegas is just one state over. So far no one you know,

but now it’s people your friends can name: a daughter’s schoolmate’s

psychologist mother. This week a bike path, a Walmart in Denver

where Ellen still lives and your favorite niece, but no one we know

shops at Walmart, do they? Soon, though. It’s only a question of numbers

and luck. It will be someone you liked but lost touch with, a boyfriend,

a roommate. Then someone you love. And then you.

—from Poets Respond
November 5, 2017

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Molly Fisk: “The violence has been increasing for years, but the NYC bike path car attack and the shootings outside Denver this week pushed me over the edge. I live in a small mountain town, but I can feel slaughter coming toward me. And it fascinates me to watch how humans fend off the truth “not me, not me,” which I don’t think we can help but do, even as we’re also trying to say, ‘Yes, it’s me, it’s us, we’re in this together, what the heck do we do!?’ I really don’t know anyone who shops at Walmart, but the line was meant to be ironic/American upper-middle class/clueless/white/etc., to continue the privilege and isolationism of the first lines, for effect.” (web)