At Cruising Altitude

Watching Pierrot le Fou
somewhere over Louisiana
on my way anywhere
else the screen gets stuck
mid-jump-cut

on the scene
in the film where
a man on a cliff
wraps his head
in dynamite
face painted blue
(more sky than sky)
above the ocean—

he was unlucky
in love, so it all
makes sense, especially
in French—

muffled by white
noise, I can fall in love
with anyone if I listen
to the wrong song
the right number of times
while staring at a sleeping
stranger whose mouth
hangs wide in an unending
scream, the book in his lap bent
at its spine

creased to a page
where the woman locks
her lover on the other side
of a glass door as he shouts
her name—

a button
pops off my blazer and
lands without a splash
in the aisle, resting
just out of reach—

the air, a thin gin and tonic
on salty lips, ice melting
in a plastic cup. I’d stay
frozen here forever, never
landing, always en route,

head gone
silver, blood
full of wings—

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Cate Peebles is the author of Thicket (Lost Roads Press, 2018) and Revenge Bodies (Tupelo Press, forthcoming). Her poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in The American Poetry Review, Bayou, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, diode, Ghost Proposal, Ploughshares, Volt, and elsewhere. A coeditor of the poetry magazine Fou (foumagazine.net), she is a museum archivist and currently lives in the Brandywine Valley on Lenape land.