The Day My Children Got Stuck
Damn my voice, stalled somewhere
between the first and second floors
of my lungs, non-explosive. Damn
these hands, too vast to reach you
through cracks. I never thought
I´d sprint the distance between landing
and desperation, collapse in a wasteland
of sweat and gasp, the separation between us
insurmountable. They say you shouldn´t
force open an elevator door, but damn
the muscle-creating gods who built
my biceps from photons. Bizarre,
how I don´t recognize the songs
filling the cabin like smoke
or water, more a cacophony of shock
and alarm, your grandma a Pied Piper,
luring all the terror out of your gut.
Damn my memories. The day I got stuck
in an elevator like this one, the mirror
that still bears the screams of a terrified
girl in its cracks. I pace outside
the door, wait for the fire department
to arrive, pray children´s tunes
aren´t jagged enough to fray cables,
blazing enough to overheat brakes.
*
Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears in ONE ART, SWWIM, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Variant Lit, among others, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, and The Indianapolis Review. She lives with her wife and children in Spain.
