Emily Lake Hansen
In Which the Narrative Collapses Alongside the Twin Towers
by Emily Lake Hansen
When I was born, my father was out to sea, his ship floating somewhere in the blue of the
Mediterranean.
Before the towers were struck that September morning, six days before my fifteenth birthday,
the sky in New York was mythologically blue.
On the ship, my father’s job was to tell pilots when to land. He tracked them in the dark, planes
reduced to arrows.
No matter how diminutive the building, how small the airport, the place where air traffic controllers
like my dad work is called a tower.
Before the towers were struck that morning, the sky in New York was Endymion blue.
When the planes were hijacked, what were the air traffic controllers thinking? What panic rose inside
their chests as the planes veered off course, lost contact with the command center?
Before the towers were struck that morning, the sky in New York was what the pilots called severe clear blue.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, the USS Lincoln pulled into the North Arabian Sea. From its deck,
the first fighter planes of the second Iraq war were launched.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, my father couldn’t sleep, stirred cognac in coffee like creamer.
On January 1, 2003, the crew of the Lincoln was ordered to remain at sea. At 289 consecutive days,
their deployment was the longest of any modern Naval carrier. Between January of 2003 and January
of 2013, I saw my father four times.
Before the towers were struck that morning, the sky in New York was as blue as my father’s eyes.
When my father returned home from his own deployment on the Lincoln, it was the happiest day
of my seven-year-old life.
2,996 people died in the World Trade Center attacks and never saw their families again.
I told my friends in college I didn’t have a dad.
Let’s open a bar and call it The Archives of our Collective Trauma
by Emily Lake Hansen
and inside we’ll serve themed cocktails
based on the poisonings we’ve endured.
Or better yet, the place will be self-serve,
the whole bar at your disposal: for me,
a bathtub-shaped vat of Courvoisier
I’ll never stop drinking from.
Our DJ will wear service khakis,
a pressed garrison cap on his head,
will require all songs be requested
in writing, to include the reasons
the song makes you cry. So understanding,
our customers will wait patiently
until Dionne Warwick or Bob Dylan
or the country song their father hummed
on the drive to school makes them
bleed wine onto their club shirts,
the peplum swoops catching
mascara like balls bouncing
on a rainbow parachute.
Behind the bar, we’ll keep therapists
on speed dial, tarot cards taped
to the walls, tools for graffitiing
over them free with purchase
of the house special: a rotating
selection of affirmations on draft.
For some costumers, the tears
will come easy. For us crybabies:
an all-season patio, severe blue
furniture under the cover
of a recession-proof, twinkle-lit sky.
At opening, the line will surely wrap
around the block, tear-wet dollar bills
floating through the air like cherries
swimming in a Shirley Temple,
like papers swirling after a bomb.
“I am deeply interested in how timelines overlap, how they can collapse onto themselves, personal traumas submerged or overshadowed by collective traumas and vice versa. These two poems, from my manuscript American Millennial, explore how 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars shaped millennials as they came of age and how the simultaneous collapse of my military family shaped my personal understanding of those generation-defining events.” —Emily Lake Hansen
Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is a fat, queer, and neurodiverse writer and the author of the poetry collection Home and Other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books) as well as two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, CALYX, Pleiades, OxMag, So to Speak, Atticus Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly among others. A former Navy brat, Emily now lives in Atlanta where she teaches creative writing at Agnes Scott College and edits for Beyond Bars, a literary journal co-edited by writers from Phillips State Prison.