Cut a vein, the blue blood reddens,
giddy with oxygen,
spreading out like the mad bloom
of algal poison
across the waves;
Open it —
and in that room suddenly awash
are the wrecks of four bodies
beached in red tide pools.
And there against the door
a red splotch were the knob should be,
a doomed colony of cells
blasted across the acid air
by one bullet at close range.
It is the color of tropic sea
over fine white sand,
framed in that wall
like some resort pool
from the hotel roof,
Haitian sun,
the smell of sugar cane and ocean in the wind
— and some other fluid,
a thin red, almost ocean,
lapping its edges.
[authorial regards to Jim Tynan, who risked his life to capture
this image photographically]
by Lee Kottner
... who is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, with poetic
works having appeared in several journals, anthologies, and a
chapbook from Blue Stone Press. She has just completed her first
novel, Prospero's Daughter. Her latest book, Stories
from the Ruins, is a hand-bound hardcover collection of
sixteen poems about the events of 9/11.
