County Dispatch 911: a poem
For those of you in a big city: life in a small rural county has a different pace, and our humor has a little different taste. Put your funny bones on: this one has a twist at the end.
Dispatching for emergency services
in a small county in Nebraska
in the early 2000’s where there are
more cattle than people, the overnight shift
can be one where you are fighting
the sandpaper growing on your eyelids,
just as the fluorescent lights are
fighting the darkness of the night sky
during your shift. Ancient handheld phone
with its cord attached to the board in front
of you, no digital read-outs to GPS the callers
to find out where they are, a dot matrix printer
to scream in the other room little digits of lines
when you run a criminal history of someone
with fifteen aliases, not one of which
is now on their illegal driver’s license.
Old versions of Law & Order play on mute
on the TV in the corner, and finally the phone rings,
someone calling 911. Is it the distraught paramedic,
her husband not breathing in the bed beside her,
so brain frozen she has forgotten
how to do CPR? Is it a combine fire,
but the driver of the machine mistakenly
tells you the address of the house next door,
so you think a building is aflame? Is it
a high-speed chase with an officer,
ending up in a corn field? No,
it is a feathered fury; someone has called
about a neighbor’s feral attack chicken,
loose again.
Tansy Julie the Soaring Eagle Paschold
