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"At once feisty and powerful, Carrie Shipers’s poems help us remember secret warnings we learn as children: to love hard
against violence, to take what we get, to escape when we can, to remember every detail for a brilliant imagination to unpack and revive: 'stories they
lived without learning/what they meant.' At last we have a poet to teach us what she learned, that 'what’s broken matters less than how it heals.'
To read Rescue Conditions is to experience the pure joy of recovering family identities—as heroes, outlaws, lovers, and tender citizens—
through art."
— Hilda Raz
Rescue Conditions Copyright 2008 by Carrie Shipers
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Carrie Shipers
Carrie Shipers is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches in the English department and works on the staff of Prairie Schooner. Her first chapbook, Ghost-Writing, was published by Pudding House in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Mid-American Review among other literary journals and magazines.
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Rescue Conditions
Like fairy tales, my mother’s stories were meant
to order the world: Once, there was a fourteen-year-
old girl, a windshield, a barbed wire fence.
Once, there was a man your father knew,
a gravel road, a cargo rack, a passenger
pinned like a frog.
I used to imagine myself
victim of more benign emergencies:
a fainting spell at school; a car accident
with no injuries except one long, dramatic cut
that wouldn’t scar; my head hitting the gym floor
so hard no one would let me move. I wanted
to be rescued from what wasn’t my fault,
the stretcher and straps a glass coffin to bear away
my blameless body. Instead, I was bitten
by a poisonous spider. I broke my ankle,
caught bronchitis, was dehydrated by the flu.
I lived by the rules my mother made:
Wear your seatbelt. Stay away from guns.
Don’t drink or take rides from people who do.
Lie to me and you’ll be sorry.
Always, I heard
warnings she wouldn’t say: If you die in pieces
on a dirt road it takes two hours to fi nd; if you slit
your lover’s throat and try to slit your own,
trailing blood all over the house; if you fall down
in a cornfi eld and no one knows till you start
to rot—don’t make me be who finds you.
I never said how much I needed to be found,
to feel her gloved hands holding mine and know
she’d save me even from the ending I deserved.
Copyright ©2008 Carrie Shipers
Waiting for Spring, 1981
Mud sucks the boots off his feet and the hot
from his coffee till his hammer goes clumsy
with cold. All fall he drives home dripping.
It could be worse, he tells his wife, stripping
his muddy jeans on newspapers spread
by the kitchen door. At least I’m working.
After the factory killed his father, he swore
he’d work outside. He hadn’t been thinking
of snow, gray afternoons spent hauling brush
or shoveling scrap wood at the mill for cash
creased into his pocket. If he stops
in a bar he goes home guilty—four kids
he can barely keep in milk. There’s no overtime
for unemployment even though he earns it
in his dreams, breathing sawdust and sweat
while his family sleeps. He wakes up wanting
whiskey but settles for a beer, pretending
he can’t hear his father say with every swallow:
Men who drink their pride are always thirsty.
Copyright ©2008 Carrie Shipers
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Job Description
Our first ten years were one emergency
after the other, him or the kids or me,
always someone bleeding, fevered, scared,
and even when I didn’t know what to do,
I pretended I did. I got out peroxide
or aspirin, reasons why we’d be okay.
He thinks my work will bring bad luck, disease
or sorrow I can’t shake. Tending strangers
by the side of the road, he says, you’ll get
yourself hurt. I’ve tried to show him
how safe I am, the gloves and sterile pads,
radio clipped to my belt, my partner
always close by. He doesn’t see how much
I need disasters that aren’t mine, to know
I can fix what isn’t my fault. In my uniform,
I walk into someone else’s mess
of unwashed dishes or broken glass, pry open
car doors crushed against their frames.
With my flashlight, I shed what light I can
Copyright ©2008 Carrie Shipers
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