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.
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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Sharing this with my daughter and my dad today, both of whom will appreciate it as I do. Thank you for sharing it here.
Oof. This kicks me right in the chest. In the best sort of way. Thank you.