Melissa Buckheit: Graveyards or Ruins

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

Free Agency 

I always wanted to be an airplane when I grew up.

I mean, I always wanted to fly.

To be like a star with blue and red lights high in the low-lying atmosphere—

                            a full cylinder of oxygen, 176 tons of jet fuel and double combustion engines

   —is American, isn’t it?

Yesterday was Independence Day—more fireworks or bombs.

Three silent planes

         have passed through the sky

visible from my front yard

 in the last twenty minutes. They’re 

  little American flags. Up there

     you can see from coast to coast,

  from one glaring shore to another dark, silent one—

      like seeing Russia from Alaska.

It’s all in your mind, how you tell it,

               like prison without due process, like prison is “freedom”

     like a prison, walking the streets doing nothing, like prison is “a state of mind”.

Remember, on an airplane, you’re free.

It’s not a bad way to die—above or below

    you can see the graveyards or ruins, the metropolis turned down low.

Once you leave, you really are free—

          each espresso served in a white ceramic airline cup & saucer

is perfect, followed by five courses,

     all at 5,000 feet over the Atlantic. I’ve

                                                      been there and it was wonderful.

I sighed. I was alive.

                                  When I returned over the Atlantic

I dropped back into America

like a spitball—

                               the kind 5th grade boys shot through school milk-straws

to dry on any surface like glue.

                                                       That weight.

I was layed over, of course

I’ve been delayed but I am here—

It isn’t a bad way to die    above or below

    like falling into heaven.

                                                To be a plane on loop over the ocean

with nothing to catch you—                               

                                            JFK to Munich, Heathrow to Boston, Tampa to Stanstead

you can just fall asleep

                    for a moment

into this dream:  America

                                      Don’t wake up.

It’s beautiful and a lie

 we keep telling ourselves.

I’m in the cockpit

I imagine there’s no one behind me, no living bodies

on this plane.

                                              There’s

just music and the porn and

it looks good.

---

Melissa Buckheit is a queer poet, translator, dancer and choreographer, photographer, English Lecturer and professional Bodywork Therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books, 2012), and two chapbooks: Dulcet You (dancing girl press, 2016), and Arc (The Drunken Boat, 2007). Her poems, translations, photography, essays, critical interviews and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, EOAGH, The Feminist Wire, HerKind, Molly Bloom, MayDay Magazine, The VOLTA, Sinister Wisdom, The Drunken Boat, Bombay Gin, Spiral Orb, Shearsman Magazine, Waxwing, and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide (University of Arizona Press, 2016), among others. Jocelyn Heath, in a review in Lambda Literary, noted of Noctilucent that, “Buckheit pairs earthly longings with writings of celestial delicacy to show us what we can see when we look beyond immediacy. Her collection, like the noctilucent cloud that shares its name, lingers long in the atmosphere.” Buckheit translates the poet Ioulita Iliopoulou from Modern Greek, and is a recepient of two Pushcart Prize nominations. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Naropa University and a B.A. in English & American Literature, Dance/Theatre & French from Brandeis University. She founded and curated the innovative Edge Reading Series in Tucson, AZ from 2008-2016, and has taught at Pima College, University of Arizona and Zuzi Dance Company. She lives in Northeast Connecticut.