Todd Mercer

The EMT with Charged Paddles Calls, “Clear!”

Save a life before breakfast

and the day is made holy. Put your weight

over an open artery, then try to believe

that you’re insignificant. We’ll get there

when we get there. Our colleagues

are too busy to clean up

ambulance accidents.

We find them on the roads, our charges,

on floors, next to commodes,

on their near-to-last chances.

“Not today,” I tell gaspers,

“Not under these hands.”

The Ankle Weights Aren’t There for Exercise

Light

is

the step,

just touches

sidewalk beneath her.

If she levitates too often,

she won’t want the ground anymore, and people will see.

They’ll see and wish to do the same,

or search for wings, clip

what they can’t

themselves

sprout.

Spite.

CP

Todd Mercer won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest, and his chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Apocrypha & Abstractions, Cease, Cows, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Postcard Poems and Prose, Right Hand Pointing, and many other fine places.