"This is Not a Drill" by Erica Lee Braverman
The emergency alert, which was sent to cellphones statewide just before 8:10 a.m., said: "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL." A revised alert informing of the "false alarm" didn't reach cellphones until 38 minutes later.
- CBC, January 2018
Yesterday we listened
to Hawaiians describe
the thirty-eight minutes before
they thought a ballistic missile
would drop. First, the realization:
no shelter, no basements
on an island. Then the families
just waiting together on the bottom floor
of their living rooms.
This morning he tells me
he can no longer feel
excitement. The once erratic
trigger finally defused
by his mood stabilizer:
a ceiling
ceaselessly above, he says.
Now the side-effect
of a blessed floor.
Like after too much coffee.
The unsteady swell
in the belly, tapering.
Or like a wave always
about to crest. To spiral
into what is mercifully
gone. Then I remember
the mother in Honolulu
carrying her children
downstairs—doing what she could
with the minutes
they thought they had—
and I take his hand,
hearing her frenzied
footsteps in my head:
that surge, then its absence,
what must mean
a kind of acceptance.
Erica Lee Braverman's poems have appeared in Meridian, Cherry Tree, Puerto Del Sol, Hotel Amerika, North American Review, Passages North, Hayden's Ferry Review, Descant, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and received her MFA at the University of Oregon. She lives in Portland.
