The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

posted Jul 14, 2009

The evening sky beside the pier looks like a great machine
of plover, gull, as if the birds were shirtwaist girls, called
to fall from floors 8 and taller, any fitted muslin not piled beside the door.

Clara, I can drive crazy eights inside the city, police the streets
for flint and sparks, collar every match I corner, or sit here on this pier
for the parade of seamstresses expended by the sky.

This time of night your eyes are green docents
where the shirtwaist girls are drawn, their paper skirts to cousin
smoke. Clara, I would worry a chalked line,

garner en masse a mess of other arms and thighs; besides, can
fitting muslin make a body, break a sidewalk skylight?  Clara, take
hypernicum, send the berries into a bird's nest:

a sympathy bouquet; hold the bunch beneath your eyes
for green, red, and white. At the pier I'll dip my fingers,
set a fingerspell to float the burning women, you and I.

Rachel Rothbart is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. She currently writes and edits marketing copy in New York City and has work forthcoming in Conduit.

We’ve published two more poems by Rothbart: “Gardenias and Kelp” and “Polaroid Outside a Movie Theatre in Idaho.”