911

Go ahead, I said. Call.
She said, Are you certain?
Yeah, I said.
She picked up the phone and dialed 911.
I didn’t have socks. I put on socks.
The woman on the phone
asked a lot of questions.
No, I wasn’t turning blue, I said.
The paramedics arrived.
They stuck adhesive pads on me
and hooked wires to a machine.
The paramedics helped me
go from the sofa to a gurney.
It took up a lot of space in our rented room.
I laid on the gurney and they rolled me out.
I expected the neighbors
to be looking at the fire trucks
on the street outside our house.
The street was empty
and the windows
up and down the block
were dark.

Kurt Nimmo lives in New Mexico. He published Planet Detroit and PNG Chapbooks in the 1980s and 1990s.