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Fire Safety

By Joshua Mehigan b. 1969 Joshua Mehigan

Aluminum tank

indifferent in its place

behind a glass door

in the passageway,

like a tea urn

in a museum case;

screaming-machines

that dumbly spend each day

waiting for gas or smoke

or hands or heat,

positioned like beige land mines

overhead,

sanguine on walls,

or posted on the street

like dwarf grandfather clocks

spray painted red;

little gray hydrant

in its warlike stance;

old fire escape,

all-weather paint job peeling,

a shelf for threadbare rugs

and yellowing plants;

sprinkler heads,

blooming from the public ceiling;

all sitting

supernaturally still,

waiting for us to cry out.

And we will.

Source: Poetry (November 2010).

Biography

Poet Joshua Mehigan grew up in upstate New York and received a BA from Purchase College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Influenced by the poetry of Philip Larkin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Bowers, Mehigan writes intelligent, morally complex lyric poems shaped by a nuanced attention to rhyme and meter. Critic Adam Kirsch praised The Optimist in a review for the New York Sun, observing, “Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in . . .

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