At Cruising Altitude

By Cate Peebles

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            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.

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