Fire Escape by Ayla Rogers
A mosaic of brick-colored mudstones—
Held together by what?
A sufficiently viscous grit?:
Minute pebbles
With a unique affinity for each other,
Bound together
In a seemingly unshakable lock
By the temporal surface-tension amongst them.
Colorful rows of bricks tower high above me—
All ‘brick red,’ but boasting different hues:
Rust, rose, fire,
And blood in the various stages of drying.
The comparisons seem intuitive,
With every reference present in the frame;
Like some designer had an eye for composition,
But disavowed all authorship.
Why call it “fire escape” anyway,
When the whole façade’s already engulfed?
What is it escaping?
I suppose that depends on my perspective,
And the nature of the fire.
From this stone slab, looking up, it reads:
“Escape to somewhere higher,”
Promising some nuanced view.
I know why the builders bolted it here;
I understand the designer’s intent.
Yet when I envision reaching
The elevated platform,
I don’t think on fleeing flames,
But on letting them consume me.
What else is the use of scaling
These cold steel rungs,
If not to feel some profound degree of heat?
I’ve never been much skilled at descending staircases.
I always think on skipping steps,
On jumping
And never coming down,
On flying,
Or on finding somewhere higher to climb to.
I start to wonder whether
The webbed canopy above my head extends a little further,
High enough to slip me wispy lifelines,
To offer a mapping for the ladders I’ll build
To take me even higher.
As long as there’s something up there,
Even if the air feels too thin to breathe,
At first.
I know I’ll adapt—like the oxidizing iron,
The dry and curling leaves,
And the inverted insects.
They turn my contemplation
To the immediate foreground—
Eyeing the tiny creatures
As they enjoy a few upright moments
Up and down my limbs.
I savor the itch, the tingle, and shudder
At the sensation of a life
Many times more fragile than my own.
Life like I could hang
From jet streams and spider silk.
Again I shift my view--
Just a pair of stark, industrial fans
Spinning for no apparent reason,
But the amusement of its accidental audience.
Like a worn out turn table
With an impotent needle,
Or some disembodied mixed-tape
No one cared enough about
To play back,
To turn over,
To tear into, to disembowel.
And so it stands,
Stark, spinning intact,
Blocking my view of the through path
Just beyond--
Blocking everything, as though its song played on
With a sort of silent deafening.
From this angle there are no steel platforms,
No rusted rungs.
Just this oversized cassette tape,
Playing A-tracks in my head.
Or a combination washer drier
At some old Laundromat,
Spinning scarves and socks,
And dress shirts that aren’t really mine.
From this angle only kneeling is possible—
My knees rubbed nearly raw
On the crude slab.
A mere conglomerate of sharps and flats,
With a melody of mosses,
Pouring from the rocky grooves ,
Providing my only relief.
The steps and rungs stretch out before me
Their image distorted by my retinas
As the structure ascends
I start to wonder whether
These different angles are whole worlds
At odds with one another.
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