Fire Rescue

from Perfect Sleeping Weather by Larry Fulford

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Scrawled into notebooks from the familiar comforts of temporary homes and the passenger seats of mechanically unsound vehicles adrift on the highways and back roads of America, Perfect Sleeping Weather is fifteen years of thoughts, observations, facts, and fictions hammered into a collection of poetry that, according to one reader, "sounds like a sigh."

In this, his first book, writer/drummer/comedian Larry Fulford reflects on the usual -- life, death, love and leaving -- while still managing to name-check Van Halen. Twice.

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lyrics

I sat at Alfonso's
eating a Sicilian
in a booth where I could see
above and beyond the Christmas bow
on the handle of a glass door no one ever used,
stained by too many washes
that were heavy on the soap,
past the Video Camera Surveillance sign (red base / white type)
that was backwards to me.

And I watched them wheel an empty gurney
to the ambulance across the street at Edgewater High.

The lights were on and EMTs,
some taller than others,
stood next to it talking.

I pictured a mother, upon finding out
just how much an ambulance ride costs,
calling the whole thing off
and sending her asthmatic daughter
to bed without supper.

Then I remembered a kid
whose name I can't remember,
a kindergarten classmate (circa 1985).

The memory begins with the girl-ish screams
young ladies have in common with young boys
and ends with our class being paraded
out of the room, right alongside Nameless Kid,
who's on the floor
with medical personnel surrounding him,
trying to keep him calm.

I swear there were other exits we could've used.
It's not like the place was on fire.

When we saw him at school again
days later,
he had cotton in his ear — maybe both ears —
and it reminded me of balled-up white bread;
which may be why, to this day, I don’t eat white bread.

That same year
some friends and I were made to sit in Time Out
for leaving the perimeter fence of the playground
to look at an egg that had fallen out of a bird's nest.

These memories live so near each other
they borrow salt and pepper from one another
when other memories need flavor.

And fire rescue rides away.
And an old man at the bar
explains to another old man at the bar
that an ambulance ride can cost you $7/mile.