People Who Are Afraid to Fly in Airplanes Love Harder

By Erica Miriam Fabri

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We do not pretend this makes sense:
eating peanuts while suspended inside a cloud?
My wing-less self, moving through the blue,
flying higher than birds do?
My body is not bigger than a mountain,
I am not meant to be more than a mountain away
from the dirt floor where the bodies I Love
are eating breakfast, kicking rocks.
You wouldn’t share a toothbrush
with your best friend, but you trust a stranger
to pilot two-hundred tons of metal
through a cold kind of air that will make you
breathless if it gets to you; you have handed over
your entire life: you know, you might only
get one: your whole wild body is being
gambled; Are you not afraid of this?
Are you also the kind of person who Loves
silently? Is your mouth a monastery?
Do you never moan? Has a surge of heartache
never gushed out from the burning inside part of you?
Do you sing? Do you scream? Do you know
that my great aunts waited until the casket
was lowered halfway into the rectangle hole
before they threw themselves on top of the box
that held their brother, father, husband.
Their wailing was an unkempt orchestra of noise,
a monster’s symphony; Where did they think
he was going? Were they afraid he might fly?
They were trying to hold him fast against
the only rock they have ever known
to be home.

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Erica Miriam Fabri’s first book, Dialect of a Skirt, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and included on the bestseller lists for Small Press Distribution and The Poetry Foundation. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and has worked as a writer, and educator for Urban Word NYC, The New York Knicks, and Nickelodeon Television. She teaches Performance Poetry and Fiction Writing at Pace University. See ericafabri.com.

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