Hayden Park
EGRESS TRIAGE
The city is still doing its thing, you know,
Taxis splashing yesterday’s rain on my cuffs,
and I’m thinking of your toothbrush, standing
here this stupid tin soldier on the ceramic.
I throw it out. It’s the first step, they say, but
it feels like an execution. The coffee bitter,
the radio is playing some song about
a love that lasts forever; I want to slash it,
unbeholden, but my arms are
so numb, crushed by the air.
Everything’s a monument to you,
even the dust dancing in that slice of sun
fall in a surgical line upon the floorboards
seem to be shouting, screaming,
and crying out your name.
The work. Tagging memories
The one with a green tag: laughing
on the fire escape, the gin and tonics
sweating and sighing in our hands.
This one is yellow: the argument
and the blue curtains, your voice
a blade I can almost live with.
But you’re sleeping, your face
soft in the morning light, your hand
on my chest—that one’s still
a black tag. Unsalvageable.
A blackened wound too deep to clean. And I am the world’s weariest
doctor, her worst patient, too, bleeding out all over the goddamn Persian rug.
For silence. Not a peaceful one. Instead of
filling silence in that languid house
cleared for demolition, I’ve packed everything. The green tags, the yellows. But the black tag refused to be stored. Sitting with me
at the table, it watched me from your chair.
I’m told I survived. But this air
is so thin, and the sky is so grey. I’m
breathing, yes. But I’m not sure if I’m just
alive. If that’s an indication of life.
Not yet, at least. They burn.
Watching me, patient as gravestones. They
stare, this sky of steel above me. I forget
to look up. My own breathing so foreign,
dark water drowning a clouded mirror.
Hayden Park is a Southern California writer and Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Medalist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Slippery Elm (Contest Issue 2025) and REDAMANCY Magazine, and in anthologies from One Page Poetry and TulipTree Publishing.