“Woman Killed at Six Flags” by Marjorie Maddox

Woman Killed at Six Flags New Orleans

July, 2003

Worried about her grandson, she double-checked the buckle—you never know about these rides—brushing his too-long bangs from his eyes—her daughter should clip those—when the ride lurched, spun, the next metal cage colliding with the just-coifed covering of her brains. And then another with a stranger’s kid; his toddler eyes helpless questions.

You can’t rush such pain fast enough into emergency, into fun-gone-fireworks-haywire, but you can try to climb away from it, the way the Down Syndrome’s man in Elysburg skinned-the-cat on the giant beams of a Knoebel’s roller coaster, afraid of the jungle-gym cage trapping him high above the amusement park lights of most children’s dreams.

It took hours to get him down to his other life, the one before terror, where cotton candy tasted like the joy his seventy-year-old mother held out to him like a ticket.

Like others, we send our children off on rickety rides carted

from one county fairgrounds to another. We watch them rise up into air thick with the stench of greasy fries and apple-fritters, and we wait for that first explosion of laughter or cries cascading over the metal spokes that bring them back, then away, then back while we question what we have done, what

we were thinking

which was, of course, about us at that size, at Hershey Park  or Dutch Wonderland, terrified or ecstatic, leaping out to a world

of glorious risk so strange we screamed to recognize ourselves and our parents, far below, just one gaping mouth really,

unable to save or stop us.

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Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (WordTech Editions); Weeknights at the Cathedral (Yellowglen Prize); When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (Redgreene Press); six chapbooks, and over 350 poems, stories, and essays in such journals and anthologies as Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, American Literary Review, US Catholic, The Art Times, Arabesque: International Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, A Fine Frenzy: Poets on Shakespeare, Hurricane Blues. For more info and reviews, please see http://www.lhup.edu/mmaddoxh/biography.htm