Equivocal, the voices in Switchboard Shift: Kathleen Fagley has braided a tenuous tapestry of hospital codes, calls, and responses between “an operator tethered to her station” and anxious speakers on the line. Hoping to “convey seriousness without panic,” she is “pressed into [her]seat by the weight of emergencies.” When “a small voice answers back...distant as the earth from the moon,” she has learned that “it is not a choice that [she] listen.” So should you.

—Christina Lovin, author of Echo: Poems and A Stirring in the Dark

Excerpt from Switchboard Shift

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Board lights up, then digits flash
before I hear the voices:
a man with stomach pains,
a woman blew out her knee,
another I have to tell to speak up,
her baby hasn’t moved for 24 hours.
She is seven and half months pregnant.

Eight hours of this and I feel as if
my ears are stopped up with water,
I feel the pain of these voices.

The doctor leans against the wall
between two rooms, the alpha pager
flashes her number and
text I entered in the tiny field of white:
Baby hasn’t moved in 24 hours.
Second call back.