The speaker of "Hanging Fire" is a 14-year-old girl. Her main personality trait is that she's worried. She's worried about typical teenager stuff: braces, pimples, and middle school dances. But she's also worried about bigger issues: namely, death. She spends a whole bunch of time in the poem focusing on her own death—what if she dies tomorrow? What if she doesn't make it til graduation?
We can't help but wonder: is this the normal anxiety of a teenage girl? Or does our speaker have legit concerns? Is she a typical, harmless goth girl, or does she have real reasons to fear death—an unsafe neighborhood perhaps, or perhaps a looming illness? The poem doesn't answer these questions for us, so we're left to wonder if our speaker is just your average melodramatic teenager, or if something more serious is going on.
One thing is for sure, however: our speaker feels isolated. She repeats the lines "and momma's in the bedroom / with the door closed" three times. It sounds like our speaker is desperate to talk to her mom about all of her fears and worries, but her mom is unavailable to her. Our speaker feels all alone, and we think she could really use a big hug from her momma right now.