In A Snap of Recall – Frank Lehner
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of what has universally become known as 9/11. And of course, anniversary is a terribly weak word in this context: annus (year) + vertere (to turn). I suggest this turning of the year should be turning toward and turning into the jubilee of remembrance, the observation of that remembrance. Observation: ob (in front of) + servare (to watch over). So many of us hold and, in a snap of recall, tell these stories, our lore, distinct and specific, yet another day of infamy, etched into our histories, communities. I’m certain you’re thinking of yours as you read. And as who we are, we select some anniversaries as extra noteworthy of pause. Twenty-five is such a designation.
What follows are five 9/11 stories. Two stories from New York City, a story from Washington DC, a story from Shanksville, and a story from Pittsburgh. These and your 9/11 stories remind us of the responsibility of love, our connection to the other, and the richness of community—so often lost when we turn away. Each of us involved in this piece asks that you tell your story to someone. Ask them to tell theirs. Let’s turn toward. Let’s watch over. Let’s hold love, hug tight.
—Frank Lehner
Severe Clear – Bo Young
I found the office. They had a television on, and they were more confused than alarmed, like me. No one knew what was happening. But when I told them I was here to pick up Will and Casey Metz they didn’t even ask any questions and directed me to where I would find them.
The teachers seemed happy that someone had come for the children. There were still a lot of kids.
I explained to Will and Casey that their mom had asked me to bring them back to my house. Was Mom OK? Yes. Was Ken? Yes. I explained in as general terms as I could manage. Everything would be OK. I hardly believed me.
They immediately turned on the television in my room, in search of cartoons or entertainment, but there was nothing but the stark image of the two smoking Towers. As we sat there, the first Tower collapsed. I turned the television off and took them downstairs to the kitchen.
What is going on?
I don’t know. Nobody knows.
Who is doing this? Nobody knows.
Where are Mom and Ken? They’ll be home soon.
Nathalie called and said she had made it home. “You wouldn’t believe the Brooklyn Bridge.”
The kids and I walked the three blocks home, the acrid smell that would never be forgotten reeking in the air. Ken showed up a little while later, ghost-like in the fine, gray dust that covered everyone walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. We shared a rather muted dinner that night, with history playing on the television in the living room.
I walked home as ash and paper with burned edges floated down out of the sky like feathers, onto the street and trees. My bedroom windows were still open. Ash, and little pieces of charred pages that appeared to be financial business, floated into the room all night, littering my bed.
The next day we all walked together to the local firehouse in Park Slope on Union Street. The firehouse had two wide-open, fire engine doors; both bays empty. The entire sidewalk in front was covered in votive candles, flowers, and photos of the young firefighters who served there. There was an eerie quiet with soft murmurings of knots of people standing.
I was handed a candle in a paper cup, a small lantern, and joined the crowd, who all had similar lights. Amazing Grace seemed to spontaneously start from somewhere, spreading through the crowd and into the furthest reaches of the mass of people that stretched up Union Street onto Seventh Avenue, filling the street from side to side, for blocks on end with twinkling candle lights reflecting in faces, as far as you could see as dusk set in. The only other sound was that of the F-16 fighter jets ripping through the air, patrolling the skies above the city.
For days, ash floated down out of the air.
Bo Young is a retired publisher of White Crane, a quarterly, reader-written journal of gay wisdom and culture. He lived in New York City for 25 years, and now lives in Upstate New York with his husband, and a clowder of barn cats, on the Vermont border.
Some Of What I Remember – Frank Lehner
I may have been on the last plane to land at National Airport on 9/11, but I didn’t know that then. I remember looking at the clock, heading to the train; it was 8:41. When I arrived at the I Street office and met my colleagues, they asked if I’d heard what happened. I hadn’t. A few had been in touch by phone with some BBC friends out of NYC and got the news that way. It was 2001; news traveled a bit slower.
We worked. Then we could see fire and smoke from our 11th-floor window. The Pentagon was ablaze. We worked some more, then received word that the second Tower had been struck.
The mood was changing—four Brits; an Australian; Tom, from Long Island; and me, from Pittsburgh. We were puzzled. The sky was so cloudlessly blue.
We worked a bit more, of sorts. Then word came to evacuate the building. All the buildings were being evacuated. We headed to the streets. The cell service had been cut. Neither Tom nor I could get word home. We walked toward our hotel; what else could we do? The tight streets were full of people looking to the sky, trying their phones, speaking to strangers. Cars were going nowhere. Yet, something amazing was going on. No horns were blowing. It was quiet. In almost every intersection, someone had decided to direct traffic, and that they did. It was what needed doing.
The quiet and the order and the unity and the civility of those few hours stay with me—perhaps my most beautiful American moment.
We went to the hotel. We worked. We stopped. We saw the Towers fall, one, then the other, on a lobby TV. We were quiet. We worked some more. I was finally able to get a word home through Tom’s wife in Long Island. I found out NPR had announced the Pittsburgh to DC flight had been hijacked. I still have the frantic voicemail my wife left me. I was alive.
Later, Tom, a volunteer fireman, received word that three of his buddies were dead. They went to the city to help; the Towers fell, their fire truck crushed.
We walked to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. There was no traffic. We were almost silent. We found a round table in a far corner. There were large fish in a large aquarium. We were stunned; there was too much on the menu. The TV was on, showing the Towers fall, again and again. The same people running the same escape runs over and over, each time being covered anew with gray fallout.
Tom got up, edged through the tight tables, and turned off the TV. No one said a word. When he sat down, we all, nearly in unison, cried, as I am, now.
Frank Lehner a poet, award-winning book designer, folk artist, and playwright out of Pittsburgh, Pa. His poetry has appeared in diverse periodicals, and his plays have been staged in Pittsburgh and New York City. His full-length book of poems, Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey, is from Bottom Dog Press (2025). You can find him at franklehner.com
In/Directions – Judith Vollmer
I didn’t know where Shanksville was. I grew up in Westmoreland County in Southwestern Pennsylvania and left my journalism job in Pittsburgh to teach at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Westmoreland County. I thought I knew Westmoreland inside out, wandering for years through fields and trekking hiking trails in the Laurel Mountains. I took my undergrad poetry students into the foothills of the Laurels. But I didn’t know where Shanksville was. The school was equidistant between Shanksville and my home in Pittsburgh. Whatever clarity might arrive regarding locations- here, there, elsewhere- was days, years, out of reach.
Faculty Secretary Cathy Schmidt walked into my office and said, “Turn on your computer—a plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers.” She looked equally confused and alert. Cathy had worked in the Gulf Tower in Pittsburgh, so maybe it was a kind of tower-blending fusing her mind. I thought, like so many Americans, it might be a repeat incident from 1993. I was packing up handouts for my 9:30 class and wanted to get there on time to write notes on the board. In the hallway, a psychology colleague had a cellphone clamped to his ear. Half-glancing at me, or no one, he said, “They might be heading for the Pentagon.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, who the they were.
I walked into the classroom and picked up the chalk; students walked in, looking tired from working or commuting, checking each other out on this bright-sky day, the first full week of the semester. I was guzzling coffee, thinking about the writing prompt I was about to deliver, and I was roughly minutes into it when a cellphone rang. Few students on our rural campus had cellphones in September 2001. Another phone went off. I could tell parents or elders were talking because there was a sound-effect of cellphones that signaled anxious voices on the lines. Waiting-in-time-warp-feeling, then a heavy knock on the door.
And when I opened it, I saw the dean, who was already rushing to the next classroom door. “We’re closing.” My students, hearing the tone in his voice, packed up, and so did I. I went back to my office and called my mother. She knew about the two planes. I don’t remember if she knew about the Pentagon. We had lost my dad six months earlier, and my mother was still numb with early grieving.
Something was happening elsewhere. I heard the words “Somerset County” in the hallway. I clearly remember thinking they’re bombing Pittsburgh; it couldn’t be Somerset County. I called my partner Ann on her cellphone. She picked up on the first ring, rare. She didn’t have clients that day, so she was at home, even rarer. “They’re not bombing Pittsburgh, honey,” she said. “It’s out somewhere in Somerset County.” I called my brother at the university’s Pittsburgh campus— safe; Seattle brother—safe. Ed and Peter were in meetings at the University of Pittsburgh Press, or teaching at Pitt’s towering beacon, the Cathedral of Learning. I reached neither. I still thought Pittsburgh was the target, for a reason I still don’t understand. I left campus, got on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and headed west for home, 40 minutes away. Westbound lanes were mostly empty, but military vehicles coming east lined the Pike, speeding toward Somerset County for Flight 93 in wild hopes of rescuing the heroes and the terrified. I didn’t know anything but my car.
Who could be alive, who were they? The plane bearing the heroes and the prayers and the terrified, we learned, had likely been headed for the Capitol or the White House. The plane force-landed onto a reclaimed strip-mined field outside the village of Shanksville, population 252 in the 2000 census. I drove home into another new world. I remember thinking I was glad my father hadn’t lived to see it. Field turned burnt site, turned slit in the ground. Turned sacred ground.
Judith Vollmer’s The Pavese Stone, her seventh full-length collection of poetry, was published by Alice James Books in March 2026. She lives in Pittsburgh’s Nine Mile Run watershed.
Making Together a Consequence of America – Nancy Koerbel
Tuesday morning and it’s late summer warm—the sky completely clear and blue. I’m sitting in my first faculty meeting at the University of Pittsburgh, tired from getting up early to drop my husband, Frank, at the airport for a business flight to Washington, D.C., but excited for the semester to begin. Backlit by the morning sun, Dave, our department chair, is almost invisible at the podium. I squint to better see his face. But what I see clearly, what forever overshadows all my other memories of this day, is what’s behind him. The windows he’s standing in front of are full of flags. A giant American flag that flexes atop a five-story-high flagpole outside room 501 in the Cathedral of Learning.
Soon American flags of all shapes and sizes will fly everywhere in solidarity with the United States because we’ve been attacked, but I don’t know that yet. I don’t know that planes overtaken by terrorists have already crashed into both the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
I learn this only after the meeting, when a woman I know confronts me with the news. I remember she and I as the only people in the room, but that can’t be. She’s using words I understand in a context I do not. No one has ever flown planes into buildings on purpose before, so this sounds serious but far-fetched. Then she mentions Washington, D.C., and I remember Frank is on his way there. By plane. If people are flying planes into buildings everywhere, including the Pentagon, he could be on one of them.
I stand in the stairwell for a minute, confused about what to do. School is shutting down. Everything is. All I can think is I need to go home. Facts surface slowly and hard-edged and slightly askew like an unhappy prediction in a Magic 8 Ball.
I get to my car and turn on the radio. We did not carry the internet in our pockets back then. The NPR announcer says a plane from Pittsburgh to D.C. was hijacked. This seems both impossible and wrong.
I call Frank immediately. Fumble the phone. He’ll know what’s going on and set things straight. But he doesn’t answer. Because everything’s scrambled, right? Because there’s probably no service where he is. But where is he? Is he still somewhere? Everything is slow and blocked and fast and horrible all at once. I start to sob before I can finish the message I leave for him. Please call. I drive home through the eerily quiet streets. It feels like there’s no solid ground anywhere.
I’m halfway home when I get a call from a woman I don’t know and will never meet—the wife of a man Frank’s with in D.C. Her husband was able to get through to tell her he’s safe, and Frank’s safe, and could she please call to let me know? We cry together over the fragile connection. Now I can stop and tell Frank’s parents he is fine. See the look of resolve on his mother’s face ease. See her return to her body when I say he is safe. The plane that hit the Pentagon was not his plane. He and the men he is with work while they watch smoke from the Pentagon billow into the bright blue sky. There is nothing else to do.
The flag outside 501 Cathedral caught my eye again when I walked past it yesterday, and I went to take a look. We’re both still here. It was another clear blue early morning, and the flag was going about its business, all bright and snappy. Surely it’s a different flag now, though. New. Twenty-five years is a long time for a flag to stay looking its best.
Of course, many things have changed. More than any of us would have thought was possible. We were just out of the twentieth century on 9/11, and so not yet over it. It seemed easier to work together. To help and care for each other. To build things meant to last. It was easier, even in the face of all that ruin, to imagine we were still, as the great Pittsburgh poet Jack Gilbert wrote, “making together a consequence of America.”
Nancy Koerbel writes poems and essays and teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is a former recipient of a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work appeared most recently in One and Redactions. She is working to become a certified Pennsylvania Master Naturalist.
