Tag: airport

Three Poems by Danielle Lemay

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I Dream of Meeting My Family at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1982
—after Geffrey Davis

Easy to spot: three of the four of us wearing matching tube socks,
pulled to the knee, white, with three blue stripes at the top,
and our sockless mother’s tan legs. How dearly
I want to press a wad of money into my mother’s palm.
Back home a cupboard of canned corn and tomatoes mimics
a full pantry. The silverware pretends to be silver.
It must have taken every last coin to hobble
to the fair, only to be knee-capped by the price
of each buttered corn on the cob, each bumper car, each ease
of thirst. I know my nine-year-old self yearns to catapult
the rubber frogs into the floating lily pads, but does not ask.
By nightfall, mom has starved herself all day, steered us to
every last free exhibit, then surprises us with four tickets
to the ferris wheel. My younger self cannot
see the top of the monster wheel, cannot bear dangling
in sky. The wheel looms larger than a skyscraper,
as if it could fall from its axle, roll through Tennessee
and Kentucky. How much weight can an axis take?
In the dream, I realize why I’m there:
to hold that little girl’s hand, to ensure
for once in my mother’s too-short life,
she’s 165 feet high, floating like Lois Lane
with Superman, wind in her face, marveling
in the dark at the kaleidoscope of light.

Notes: In 1982, The Giant Wheel at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, was the largest ferris wheel operating in the world at that time. It was 165 feet high and had the capacity of 240 passengers in 40 6-person gondolas.

*

Where the Flowers Have No Names

In my hometown, the highway billboard reads
If You Can’t Read, We Can Help

Maybe. It feels out of reach, doesn’t it?
Like if you know the right someone.

My grandmother kept her native words
tucked in her bra like folded cash.

Which is to say I was not taught the names
of things. No matter the color,

a flower was simply flou-wah,
anything reptilian with legs was liz-ahd,

and any passing vehicle was a cah.
The compartment of her brain for specificity

lay paralyzed in the black basement of her childhood,
the door sealed so tightly that when the cashier

asked for the name of girl-me in the shopping cart,
my grandmother said I call her dee-yah.

She swaddled me, fleshy arms to pillowy bosom,
kissed a bushel and a peck of kisses.

Does it matter that I still don’t know the names
of the purple flowers on the vines outside that 2-bed,

1-bath cinderblock in which we all lived?
If You Need A Hug, I Can Help.

*

Not Another Poem About Flowers

Poor college student, I bussed to a bridal shower
of Harvard girls who brought gifts like a coffee-table

Book of Flowers. My blue-collar special stood alone:
a cakepan, spatulas, decorating tubes and tips

wrapped together inside a Rubbermaid cake-keeper.
My mother didn’t like flowers either. Bouquet

of Brief Beauty Before Wilt-Death. Allergy
Bouquet. Bouquet of Pet Killers. Bouquet

of You-Could-Have-Fed-the-Children. I’d rather
a bouquet of cash or a fresh bunch of rainbow

chard, or a bowl of arugula.
In our cash-strapped 20s, my lover greeted

me with a napkin surprise—leftover bits
of her last meal. I was never that hungry

but appreciated pressing against her jeans—
her rough car keys, tube of Chapstick, pocket knife,

and her wallet-ass. We’re upscale now.
When I arrive at baggage claim after COVID-fasting

across the country, roll my luggage past
the greeters with red roses and pink carnations

and step into the passenger seat of her car,
she places two steel bowls in my lap—

blanched organic broccoli, plump orange slices—
with a bouquet of utensils to unwrap.

*

Danielle Lemay is a poet and a scientist. She was Boulevard’s Emerging Poets Contest Winner and a Patricia Cleary Miller Award Finalist at New Letters. Her poetry has appeared in Boulevard, Poetry South, On the Seawall, ONE ART, and many other journals. More at DanielleLemay.com

Ten Hours at the Airport by Karly Randolph Pitman

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Ten Hours at the Airport
with gratitude for a line from Hawk McCrary

Your heart sinks when you see the message –
delayed, again, after one flight had already
been cancelled. But there was nothing you
could do, so you tuck your bag over your
shoulder and trudge through the long alleys.
You find a small bookstore and sit
on the corner of the floor for an hour,
reading a book on ADD and cleaning.
You walk to your gate, unpack your lunch,
eat the cold chicken and yams. When the flight’s
delayed for the third time, you rise to stand
in the snaking line with the others, all those
with somewhere important to go.
The young woman in front of you
clutches her group of paper boarding passes:
Cleveland to Atlanta, Atlanta to Amsterdam,
Amsterdam to Riyadh. Her ill mother waits
for her at the hospital. You catch her wide eyes,
help her talk to the gate agent, stay with her
until her problem is solved. You trade numbers
as a manager brings out bags of food, lays them
out on a table and tells the crowd to help themselves.
Other passengers are huddled together on the chairs,
telling each other stories about their time in the
other’s hometown as they eat the chicken sandwiches.
A grandmother, dressed in her good skirt and shoes,
naps with her head leaned back against the wall.
Strangers before, you’re bonded by your changed plans,
your many hours together. As the day turns to night,
a woman seethes into her phone, demanding a hotel room.
A gate agent calls an angry man darling then retreats,
apologizing, as he bristles – don’t call me darling.
Your new friend, newer to English, whispers to you,
Is darling a bad word? You reassure her it isn’t,
a term of endearment that to this man, wasn’t endearing.
You know the stakes are low for you –
your days of flying with small children are over.
You have room, this day, to be late. You have
your lunch and a book. But in the crowd, you see
every possible response to thwarted plans. Any of them
could be you, or have been, once. When the pilot announces
there’s a slim chance the flight might make it out tonight,
the group lets out a cheer. Hours later, you board in triumph,
your gratitude made deeper by your waiting. You give
the gate agents a standing ovation and they blush,
all smile and shine. At home, your family makes a joke
about how you’ve been in airport hell. A friend corrects them.
No, it’s been airport heaven.

*

Karly Randolph Pitman is a writer, teacher, facilitator and mental health trainer who brings understanding to sugar addiction, overeating and other ways we care for trauma. You can find her poetry at O Nobly Born, a reader supported newsletter, and her healing work with food at her substack, When Food is Your Mother. She lives in Austin, Texas where she does as much as possible with her hands and is writing a book on bringing compassion to food suffering.

A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs by Dana Henry Martin

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A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs

       More than a million pangolins were caught from the wild
       between 2000 and 2013, making the species
       the most trafficked mammal in the world

His long tail wraps around his body
as every abdominal muscle works itself
tighter. He’s balancing on his head now,
front arms tucked into his stomach, stocky
back legs clawing the air, eager to settle.
He unfurls to adjust his head once more
then lies as if frozen with only his scales
to protect him. They aren’t designed
to keep humans at bay. He’s lucky
he was transported live and not
as a bag of scales, already reduced to
a hangover cure or a remedy for itching
and asthma. The box is empty except for
the pangolin, who occupies a small corner
of the relatively vast interior, like a ball
thrown into an empty room and left there,
forgotten. His abdomen rises and falls.
The exquisite armor of his back spreads
and contracts as agents talk and laugh
in the near distance. Just another day
for them. He may die from stress
before he reaches safety. He’s one
of hundreds of thousands each year
who meet this end or worse, never
making it to customs alive. His name
comes from the Malay word penggulung,
which means roller and describes
what he’s doing, rolling under threat
in self-defense. I want to tell you
that I’ve felt like a pangolin, that I’ve
curved my back and tucked my head
and limbs inside to protect my soft
center, that I’m not being metaphorical,
that humans get trafficked, too, even
when we don’t know the word because
we’re young and we aren’t poached
as much as harvested within our families
so even if we had scales, we wouldn’t
expose them because the man reaching
for us is our father or one of his friends.
But mostly I want you to save this pangolin
and every pangolin on Earth, and that’s not
a metaphor either, but it’s also a metaphor.
It’s both at once, like a living being who’s
also a cure for someone else’s suffering
even though they aren’t and never will be.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).