Archives

Amlanjyoti Goswami
Humming

Three little birds disappeared into blue morning.
A vast room to be free.

Others try sorties, their gliding arms
A reach too far.

Flying for the sake of it.
Not for crumbs thrown on ground.

There is a time for hunger, but now is a time for flight.
So I am writing this, with nothing in mind

But to learn the art of the art
Where lines skip, jump and sometimes fly

Then land smoothly on the page
Or huddle by a shelter, on a wintry morning.

Let other birds cackle and screech
About lack of speed, this and that.

I saw three birds fly into morning.
They didn’t ask for anything.

Gene Groves
One of Our Aviators is Missing

                      after Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart.
 
I was a horn player in Madisons
in the Jazz Age. They call it that now
like it was centuries ago, yesterday to me.

She was a regular
before that guy slapped a ring on her finger. Shingled hair
and long legs flapping Charleston wings

like some exotic bird of paradise
twirling her beads like there was no tomorrow
darting to a table in her glad rags

for her Manhattan, back on the dance floor
clapping her knees to Black Bottom
laughing up at me, fringes flying.

Hard to imagine her in leathers,
more boy than girl in the photo.
All those old tunes

I can remember them all.
What are they playing now?
Sinatra. Come Fly With Me.

Lisa Rosenberg
Doors

One of the doors said PILOTS,
the other, LADIES.

I had a student license, at seventeen;
unruly hair, freckles, lip gloss, and jeans,

yet I thought briefly—

before entering the restroom
in a small diner
at a small airport—

briefly of entering

the room in which I was not
presumed to exist.

Anna Saunders
Airborne

The sky will not be empty of acrobats
for long, soon they will come,
ascend the steps into the bright ether.

I watched a girl climb the ladder yesterday,
rise up to a perch at the top,
heard the instructor
tell her to grip the trapeze and leap.

When she swung the strings seemed invisible,
it looked as if she was hanging from the sky.

That same morning at school a student
dragged herself into class if her sorrows
were huge stones in her pockets.

She’s not the only one round here
to be fixed to the earth by ballast,
but something changes
when they start to write—
their bodies seem airborne.

Yesterday I watched them turn
to crescent moons—
concave against azure.

Those with more experience can turn over
and in on themselves,
subvert their vision
whilst they are up there.

I will never tire of seeing this, the way
these little artists marry the heavens.

Lance Larsen
The Morning After My Nephew Took His Life

Five hot air balloons float above our fair city,
each an elegy, each an invitation to climb
aboard and drift above the jolts and cinders
of one’s life. One balloon bobs like an apple,
one snuffles along all pink pig, one salutes
like a marine, one invites me to upload
my loneliness at a 1-800 number and harvest
a spouse, one wants to sell me an oh so lovely
house. None announces my nephew’s
final hour, none drops skateboard Polaroids
of him thrashing the heavens one ollie,
one pop-shove 360 at a time. And me?
A coward at heart, I’ve kept mum as well,
failing to dip my kids in the numbing news.
If I blink three times, maybe the piggy
will turn into a pineapple, my nephew’s
favourite fruit. I blink, I even swear on the wispy
tail of a passing cloud, but the pig remains
a pig, our county is still minus a nephew,
and none of the balloons is dropping
spelling bee trophies or finger paintings
of the Sea of Tranquillity or prom pictures
stuck between snarl and smile. The balloons
breathe fire like duelling dragons and climb.
Except the pig balloon, which drops,
then drops again, wafting, slipping, finally
touching down in the field behind our house.
And all the neighbourhood kids, including mine,
converge as if a popsicle truck had spilled
its payload. Here we are with a swaying
ghost beyond our hedges. No promises
to fix anyone’s now and forever grief.
This is only a visit, an ad-lib drift-down visit,
and all we can do is stumble forward,
like supplicants, and touch the slippery silk.