Switchboard Shift

Kathleen Fagley's Switchboard Shift grapples with urgent demands of time in health crises. Headsets and lines render her "a reader of voices" speaking "another language/driven by machines." The job requires efficiency, calm, and separation from primary human emotions. The speaker says, "the mother is in shock/and I am losing my voice." The operator questions her visual and aural abilities, wants nothing more than to fly above rivers, upturned trees. But the wolverine stalks hospital hallways.

-Susan Roney-O'Brien, author of Bone Circle and Thira



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