Routine (What the Neighbors Don’t See)
The girl goes to where
her mother told her to go
the first time
by the bookshelves
in the sunroom.
She rocks her belly
on a green pilates ball
meant for TV exercises
and focuses on the shifting
rug—dizzy white
patchwork.
The paramedics take
her brother who has
gone blue.
The ambulance wails
its circular ringing—
and once her mother
goes
and the front door
slams
she is always left with
a faint hum
in her seashell ear.
**This poem was first published in Feels Blind Literary
Shalini Rana is a poet from Virginia and an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation. Her poems appear in Copihue Poetry, Salt Hill, Pile Press, Rappahannock Review, wildness, Line Rider Press, Feels Blind Literary, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Find her at shalinirana.com.
This breaks my heart. The neighbors did not know what happened inside, but we heard the ambulances come every time. We stopped what we were doing and prayed for Shiv. We knew what was happening, more or less. We knew it was Shiv. My younger daughter was the same age as Shiv. We love you all and our hearts were and are always with you every time we heard that ambulance.
I hope Shalini writes the whole story up to the present.
Even now that sea shell rings from the chants playing from Shiv’s room. A heartbeat that still changes everyone and everything.
What a great metaphor Shalini. Keep going and never stop!
The thing I love about this poem is the ending. The sound of the circular ringing, lingering in the poet’s ear like the faint hum of a seashell.
The line is surprising and unexpected and therefore, lingers in my mind as a reader. It’s as if the line resonates on multiple levels (literal, metaphorical and as an actionable effect on the mind of the reader).