by Aidan Lee
“3 HUNGRY DAYS FOR DELIVERYMAN STUCK IN ELEVATOR”
“A restaurant deliveryman who immigrated from China and speaks virtually no English
spent three days unnoticed in a stalled high-rise elevator in the Bronx as an intensive search
swirled around him, the police said today.” — New York Times, April 6, 2005
FOR THREE DAYS no one saw him
metal box suspended
between floors
three days, crouched,
then bent: hunger and thirst
and fear wondering
why the elevator hadn’t stopped
before he delivered the food,
why the super down below
didn’t hear the elevator’s alarm
for three days, why
no one heard his voice
over the intercom (broken English, unintelligible
dialect, best ignored therefore) three
days police knocked
on doors in the apartment towers,
dredged ponds
for three days the man wondered
if his wife and son in China
would ever know why
no one heard him for three days.
AIDAN LEE was a 2019 MacDowell fellow. Her poetry collection If You Had Known Me was a semi-finalist in Persea Books’ 2019 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and a semi-finalist in Crab Orchard Review's 2019, 2018 and 2017 First Book Award Competition.
Her poems have been published by Salamander, Bayou, Memoir, Cultural Weekly, Aunt Chloe, J Journal, Tiferet Journal, Santa Ana Review, Snapdragon, Rise Up Review, Paper Nautilus and The Fourth River. She had notable essays in the Best American Essays 2017, 2016 and 2015. Lee has an MFA from Hunter College.
Aidan Lee is a pseudonym.