The Ninth Floor
The Ninth Floor was published in the December, 2025 issue of The Poetry Habitat.
For the victims of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25, 1911, who in a scant 15 minutes died of asphyxiation, burns, and blunt-force trauma.
They’d locked all the doors—
To make sure there were no thefts.
To make sure no one left their work.
To make sure the union stayed out.
To make sure they made the most money:
They made sure 146 people died.
People who weren’t human to the owners,
tools to be worn out and replaced—hours
and days and weeks at the machines, labor
translating into money in the owners’ pockets.
Newly arrived from the poverty and pogroms
of Europe, speaking little English (Yiddish
and Italian were their native tongues), seeking
only a better life. Working hot tired 12-hour
days, hair pinned up to better see the fabric,
the stitching. Girls with sweat on their faces,
their hands, a trickle between their breasts.
Windows shut to keep the textiles clean. No
talking, no singing, paying for their own
needles, crowded together at work as they were
at home: the Gilded Age never reached tenements
defined by want, only blocks away from
the extravagance of Fifth Avenue, the vocabulary
of equality and fairness up against that of privilege,
ownership—but to strike meant walking away
from the only thing standing between them
and starvation. Still they did; they picketed, they
chanted, they told the world of the danger, and finally
went back, none of their fears addressed, their need
greater than a strike could endure.
And then smoke, flames, screaming through
the rows of machines on a hot wind, fire escape
buckling, elevator jammed, stairwells a conduit
for the fire. Smoke and flames and terror
until there was no escape, teenagers forced
to make the most terrible of choices—making
your body accept that being flung down nine floors
is better than burning alive.
Aftermath. Sidewalks covered with bodies and debris:
a rosary, a comb, a hat decorated with a jaunty
red rose, plans for an evening of dancing,
of romance, and in the end reform came—
but only because women burned.
***
Triangle by the numbers:
15 minutes
123 women and girls dead
23 men dead
1 manslaughter trial
2 acquittals
$75 compensation per life
And a labor movement that blew through the world
and broke it wide open.