427: The Face that Didn't Fit
"The Face that Didn't Fit"
Shira Erlichman
Haifa, Israel: 1990
In the basement of an elementary school
three hundred children practiced strapping on
matching green faces, sniffing behind musty rubber.
Our teacher told us to imagine: Imagine the alarm.
So six hundred feet shuffled down stairwells
into the damp, neon-lit room,
one silent siren wailing inside all our delicate skulls.
Practice, we called it, like amateur magicians
we practiced every day of the week,
fastening with hands obedient as trained doves
so that when the bombs fell toward our secret mouths
we could reappear after disappearing.
When the voice arrived in my bedroom
from the desert of howling and shrapnel welts
I awoke to the red bulb of the alarm on my ceiling
screaming like a terrified eye. Not ready.
Not ready for my mother bursting through the door
like a belated bride, my baby brother's tears climbing down
her chest like hungry vines; the shriek of duct-tape's silver mouth
sealed across windows and doors so as to keep the yellow phantom
of gas from haunting our lungs.
I never imagined my face wouldn't fit.
My mother threw it back into the box, frustrated
with the skin that wouldn't stretch.
We sat by the radio, the static in our hands
was like torn envelopes with no letters inside.
Yet when I looked into its eyeless sockets I was not afraid.
Tomorrow my parents would take me to the factory,
shelf upon shelf upon shelf of answers.
There someone would surely recognize me,
find the right brown box, hand it to us and say, "Here it is,"
conveyor belts filled with faces rolling on forever.
Shira Erlichman
Haifa, Israel: 1990
In the basement of an elementary school
three hundred children practiced strapping on
matching green faces, sniffing behind musty rubber.
Our teacher told us to imagine: Imagine the alarm.
So six hundred feet shuffled down stairwells
into the damp, neon-lit room,
one silent siren wailing inside all our delicate skulls.
Practice, we called it, like amateur magicians
we practiced every day of the week,
fastening with hands obedient as trained doves
so that when the bombs fell toward our secret mouths
we could reappear after disappearing.
When the voice arrived in my bedroom
from the desert of howling and shrapnel welts
I awoke to the red bulb of the alarm on my ceiling
screaming like a terrified eye. Not ready.
Not ready for my mother bursting through the door
like a belated bride, my baby brother's tears climbing down
her chest like hungry vines; the shriek of duct-tape's silver mouth
sealed across windows and doors so as to keep the yellow phantom
of gas from haunting our lungs.
I never imagined my face wouldn't fit.
My mother threw it back into the box, frustrated
with the skin that wouldn't stretch.
We sat by the radio, the static in our hands
was like torn envelopes with no letters inside.
Yet when I looked into its eyeless sockets I was not afraid.
Tomorrow my parents would take me to the factory,
shelf upon shelf upon shelf of answers.
There someone would surely recognize me,
find the right brown box, hand it to us and say, "Here it is,"
conveyor belts filled with faces rolling on forever.