Interception

by Esther Israel

April 16, 2023

The father with his son in the back seat

turns his Toyota Tacoma east

into my northbound body.

I am hit on the left and lose time

while I am projecting in the air like a rag doll.

I don’t know when I skid or bang my head

on the asphalt or fracture bones.

Male voices are shouting above me,

“Don’t get up! Don’t get up!”

There are witnesses to what I don’t know

is happening to me

on my way home from synagogue.

Firefighters and EMT log-roll me on my left side

where my cracked ribs seize up in pain.

They ask me about health insurance

and slide me onto a board and wheel me

into an ambulance. In Salt Lake City, Utah,

a mecca for opioid addiction, I decline

pain killers on the bumpy noisy ride to the

University of Utah hospital where

emergency room personnel cut off my clothes

and refer to my traumatized body as patient ‘Yodel Omega’.

I was naked with a neck brace

and covered in many blankets

when I was wheeled into a room

to stare at the ceiling for several hours.

Police and hospital staff moved around

my immobilized body, snapped pictures,

and asked about drugs and alcohol

and suicide and advanced directs.

I couldn’t call anyone because my cell phone

was at home and also because it was Shabbat

so I waited 5 hours and

asked hospital staff to call a number

I knew by memory

which was my mother’s landline

in New York.

When was it fated for me to be struck

in the pedestrian crosswalk after I waited for the light to change;

and when was it fated for someone to drive into me

at 800 South and 900 East on Saturday, on October 23, 2021?

If the driver hadn’t been looking

over his left shoulder while he turned

his pickup truck, he would have seen

my bundled up body trying to make its way

home in the rain.

This poem was inspired by what happened to me and by reading a poem a year and a half later, called "The Book of Life" by Stuart Kestenbaum in his book of poetry, Pilgrimage, on pages 3-4. It was published by Coyote Love Press in 1990.

The picture was taken on October 23, 2021, at 2:58 PM by the Salt Lake City Police Department Crime Lab when I was in Room 15 of the Emergency Department and waiting to be admitted into the University of Utah Medical Hospital.