Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Honeymoon Meditation: Flight Number 1967  
Keith Montesano

Never able to sleep on planes, this is no different: too many
passengers, sun gleaming into windows, while children,

seatbelts unbuckled, play action-figure-killing-action-figure,

as the flight attendants tell them every few minutes to remain seated. And of the many crashes this year,

what goes through their heads? To see every continent

and city, even for a glimpse, and to name what most
see only in photos, to finally go down unlovingly

into oceans they’ve slept above countless times

over the years? Next to me you’re sleeping, open-mouthed, turning and twisting every few minutes, never finding

a comfortable position. Only the pilot knows where we are,

and for that our thoughts are masked by trust, as we assume
we’ll land perfectly, with only minor turbulence along the way.

I want to ask the flight attendants to describe their fears:

Are you frightened every time the wheels lift off the ground? you worry your husband’s having affairs? Don’t you know

this is how you’re going die? There’s something beautiful

about every one of them, something I can never explain.
Next to me still, your eyes closed, facing the window,

I can’t tell you what I’m dreaming: our bodies lulled, then sinking.

 

Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collection Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.