Graham MacIndoe, Untitled from the series Coming Clean (2004-2010). © Graham MacIndoe
Fire Escape
by Suzanne Highland
On walks we are drawn to the flowers: pink petal gossips, fat plumes
floating across the bush, even the huge red ones,
freighted with a human civilization’s worth of significance.
I don’t want to die before you,
I tell her in my head.
I don’t want to leave you alone,
childless, your collection of shells growing.
Hidden as I am, still: on the airplane, an aisle over, in the entrance
to the cave, blowing bubbles in the water with her nose,
reaching towards one of my ankles.
Every patch in the foliage, every yowling cat,
every time the woman in the other building sings,
every airplane, every power tool, every squawking cardinal.
All my childhood I wanted a tree house, and now my childhood belongs to a world
that is over.
The outside doesn't look safe to swim in. The wind starts to fray my jeans.
While somewhere my mother is saying, No. I wouldn’t have. Not that you
and your sister aren’t wonderful.
Published January 5th, 2020
Suzanne Highland is a queer poet from Sarasota, Florida. She has a BA in English from Florida State University and an MFA from Hunter College, where she was one of the recipients of the 2016 Miriam Weinberg Richter Award. She has also received support from the 92nd Street Y, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Brooklyn Poets, where she was a fellow in the summer of 2018. In 2019, she was a semifinalist for the Submerging Writers Fellowship from Fear No Lit. Suzanne's work appears or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, Nat. Brut, Redivider, and Willow Springs, among others. She teaches writing to public high school students and lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can visit her at www.suzannehighland.com and @emotingsweater.
Born in Scotland, Graham MacIndoe studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art and received a master's degree in photography from the Royal College of Art in London. He is an assistant professor of photography at Parsons The New School in New York City, where he has been teaching since 2011, and has worked as a photographer for more than 20 years. His documentary and portrait photography focuses on a range of social justice issues, as well as art, music, and running—a lifelong passion he continues today. Graham’s photographs have been exhibited widely, including a 2018 solo exhibition at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati of photos he’s taken of the Grammy award-winning band The National. In 2017, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery acquired and exhibited a series of photographs he took during a period of addiction, accompanied by text and multimedia describing his trajectory to recovery. Graham and his wife. Susan Stellin, are also the authors of a dual memoir, Chancers, about addiction, incarceration and recovery, which was published by Random House in 2016. They co-curated the exhibition Beyond Addiction: Reframing Recovery, at the Aronson Galleries at The New School in 2018 and were awarded a faculty research grant to pursue a project about recovery. He has been interviewed by a wide range of print, television, and radio outlets and his photographs have been published and written about in many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, New York, The Financial Times Magazine, Harpers, Rolling Stone, I.D., and Vice. His work is in the collections of The Scottish National Galleries, The New York Public Library, The British Council, The V&A Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Florida, The British Museum of Film and Television and various private collections.