Judith Mikesch McKenzie Shape Shifting

Shape Shifting

We pace the storm at forty thousand feet it taps our wings and dances away to the horizon

A mountain of clouds races us, fire-lit through the sky, its blaze reflected in my eyes

daring me to follow when all I can do is watch, like the time I saw my first fireworks

aching then and now to rise and soar with the colors, with the fire, fearless.

losing me in wonder, my only regret that you are not here to love this as much as I

“We can’t afford fear,” you told me on the day I asked, and finally now I know, the breath

that is no longer mine as I lose it in the face of the only real power, the power I once hated

because it could not save you, a power that I now worship, that I breathe in, so that it can save me.

Judith Mikesch McKenzie

Judith McKenzie is a recent winner in the Cunningham Short Story Contest and Tillie Olsen Short Story Contest. Her poems have been published in Poetic Bond X, Halcyone Literary Review, Scriblerus, and others.