If only he would teach me how to fly.
Everything is his airspace, even the emptiness
of the sky inside me. Up, up, back into the wild blue
yonder, I don’t know why we abandon
our approach, Abort! Abort! my father commands.
We tilt, whoops, back into the sky,
ears popping, I press my headache against palms,
feel the earth that reached for us like a mother
pull away, no longer wanting our homecoming.
Sometimes beauty and pain are one.
The sky so blue it hurts the outline of your skin.
Feels like my eyeballs crack
as I stare ahead in the rented Cessna.
My sanitary pad no longer holds
the payload I’m dropping from the D and C
I keep secret like this prayer of supplication
to the saints of aeronautics. I’m a teenager bleeding
all over of the gold upholstery. I’m travelling
into my father’s mistakes of procedure
for landing. He knows nothing about this loss
of lineage, he is like an eraser after use, well worn,
loved, bitten. I look out the oval of window,
I am a reflection, a great horned owl from her perch
who knows she is a murderous raptor. I am wiser
than my siblings below us coming into view
on the playground unattended. He’ll fly over
them to give the sense they are being
watched over by the God
he thinks he is to women and to us,
but really I’m out of metaphors,
so I lie about place and time.
My father never lets me fly
with him. I, too, watch from below,
still bleeding, still watching the aborted
landing.
