QAirport
Emily Kendal Frey
Blue Hour Press 1709 8th St Tuscaloosa, AL 35401 www.bluehourpress.com editor@bluehourpress.com Copyright Š 2009 Emily Kendal Frey All rights reserved. Photograph by Robyn York, Smoke (2009). www.postart.ca. Cover and art by Justin Runge.
Grateful thanks to the editors of the following publications in which the following poems first appeared: Inch: “I’m my own…” Strange Machine: “On the way I thought…,” “When I picked you…” and “I left my jacket…” “I drink full…,” “When we find out…,” “Your car is a black…,” “I want the things I face…,” “How do we live…,” “The tarmac looks…” and “The restroom is quiet…” are featured in The Unwin-Dunraven Quarterly, Issue 2
for ZS
Airport On the way I thought the freeway might break in half and on the way back a bird flew backwards out of me
Airport As I circled in to your terminal a snake bit my ankle and I had to press on the Reliant’s brake so hard I almost threw you into the sky
Airport I left my jacket on a plane
Airport At the TGI Friday’s we got an exuberant waiter who brought our fried green beans with extreme speed It made us feel like we were flying
Airport I drink full cans of cranberry when airborne The sweetness keeps me I won’t see any slash of sun on mountains not already seen O Woman across the aisle with sad hands daughter me Who are we? I’m saying everything over California
Airport The revolving door is comforting I take a few extra turns inside letting the new people in my pie slice shift and breathe on me I move into the terminal a little less lonely
Airport The departure times should be sharper, more in focus I’m not going anywhere I can get back from The gates are hard like an alphabet Buy me some sesame stix and a sweating water I thought for a second I saw someone I knew but it was deja vu
Airport One analogy for me today is the grey snack box flat and plasticwrapped with no one having any clue about what is inside only that there are more layers to get through
Airport When we find out that we’re not sitting together we go to the counter as if there’s something to be done about it as if a plane could contain us as if we could go anywhere we’re not already flying away from
Airport The moving walkway kept catching my shoelace and I saw the place I wanted to buy a snack at whiz past so I just kept going into a new concourse with a lot of old gates with old rules like smoking and being quiet and beige
Airport As you lift off and the wheels fold under the plane like bat feet remember me hunching home in the rain The place between our knees is empty
Airport I know your bag is big and things like papers and sweaty waters are falling from it but could you move it aside so I can sit and wait at this dumpy gate?
Airport How do we live much less breathe in this place of potential disaster? I don’t mean burning clouds but the people on the ground ready to forget us before we come down
Airport I’m my own God’s arrow flung from my own bow into a fat sky moving through places I don’t recognize
Airport The restroom is quiet as a kite I hedge my bags against my legs blink blink blink
Airport The tarmac looks back at me: You think you can die in my shade?
Airport Every voice announcing flights has to say the same thing twice: Get on board Fight for your life
Airport This is the house we go to when there is no bird to fly dumb hoping into
Airport Two people struggled at the baggage claim Don’t touch my stuff a jerky guy said to a short lady opening his non-descript bag She took a long time backing off and I really wanted to high five her
Airport I want the things I face to face me: back, back, back time, time, time
Airport Your car is a black whale come to eat me. I stand still and hope it happens quickly
The textblocks were set in Perpetua, designed by Eric Gill in 1929. The titles are set in Frutiger, the ubiquitous airport signage typeface commissioned by the Charles De Gaulle International Airport in 1968, designed by Adrian Frutiger.