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.