Emily Adams-Aucoin
Delay
The children are asking if they’ll ever be able to leave
the airplane or if this is their new cylindrical metal home,
which is not flying but capable of flight, like a giant wounded bird.
Have these strangers become significant? They are thin ties,
like strands of a spider’s web, but they do connect us.
The children think the pilot is a kind of god. Isn’t he?
They pray convincingly enough. A young boy pees his pants
while waiting, but no one yells at him. His parents practice grace.
The airport appears to all of us as a kind of heaven which
we do not yet deserve. Those who retrieved their bags in haste
when the plane landed, greedy with their suitcases of hope,
are now placing them back into the overhead bins and sitting
in their assigned seats. The estimated waiting time stretches
into a bottomless future, a cold ocean of absolute unknowing.
The flight attendant passes out leftover cookies, and we eat them
as if we’re taking communion, letting the sweet body of the delay,
which tells us again about ourselves, dissolve on our tongues.
Some of us have loved ones waiting just beyond the barrier.
Our phones sing out like angels with their calls.
Emergency Exit Stairwell, New Orleans
The doors locked behind us, so we’re stuck
ascending and descending this great staircase,
our hands learning the chipped yellow paint on
the rails. If we get out of here, we’ll eat oysters.
We’ll make love again, soft and seasonless.
Unlikely a pearl will come from this—
even here we become an emergency,
starving something in ourselves because
that’s what we think it means to be human.
The harps on the outside sound unpracticed
and out of tune, blaring like alarms
for our suddenly fluorescent morning.
Still, anything might save us—some spare
angel, a decent story that doesn’t end
in sacrifice, three bars of cell phone service.
It doesn’t matter now that we shouldn’t have
come here. In our desperation, we mistake
signs for other signs. On the other side
of every handleless door is heaven.
All we can do is keep knocking.
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Emily Adams-Aucoin has been published in magazines such as Colorado Review, Electric Literature, Frontier Poetry, Identity Theory, North American Review, and Sixth Finch. She’s a poetry editor for Kitchen Table Quarterly. website |
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