Sometimes I still wait for my daddy
to land, my childhood a dream
from which I can’t quite wake. Years
later, he still taught ground school,
still took students for their first flights.
A student flew into a power line,
their plane exploding into flames,
both dead before the ashes consumed
the ground. Someone called to tell me,
from the tiny orange terminal, the place
I had spent all those childhood Saturdays,
reading books and dreaming of big cities,
while my dad made extra money to pay
my mother’s medical bills. People talk
about when flying was glamorous,
when beautiful women presented you
meals under bell jars. I never travelled
that way. Instead, I rode in the luggage
area of a Cessna, stowed away, a carry-on
that he never forgot to take with him.
is the author of a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small (Backwaters Press, 2011), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy (Storylandia: The Wapshot Journal of Fiction; Issue 3, Winter 2011). She has just completed a book of photographs, Illusion Warehouse. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction appear in The Iowa Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Madison Review, Orchid, Blue Mesa Review, Gargoyle, South Carolina Review, Slipstream, Natural Bridge, Confluence, Eclipse, Other Voices, and elsewhere.
