This is Bonus Cut Poetry, a series that features original poems by Bonus Cut staff, artists and YOU! In this series, our mission is to bring people together in poetry, share stories and display wonderful artistic pieces. If you would like to have your poems in the next Bonus Cut Poetry installment, just email us at bonuscut@gmail.com
This installment features guest-writer Ariel Kaplowitz.
In your crashing dream
By: Ariel Kaplowitz
We stand on the deck of an airplane. Around us are glass windows.
We can see the nightsky outside. We are flying to Hong Kong.
The pilot speaks through the intercom: “unexpected turbulence.”
We buckle seatbelts, too late. We begin to fall.
Gravity belches us downward. My stomach presses against my throat. Our seatbelts
cut our laps. We know the plane will regain control.
Hong Kong expands, red and yellow with incandescent bulbs.
The plane seeps closer, parallel to the earth but
sinking. My phone won’t turn on. The pilot comes over the intercom.
“We’ve lost control,” he says. We’re falling.
My friend calls her lover, the pilot. I love you, she tells him. I’m sorry, he says.
My phone is blank. Everyone I love is on the plane but you.
Your absence presses against me firmly.
I clench my phone between white knuckles.
I love you, I scream to you in my brain, hoping for telepathic airwaves.
The plane skims the necks of buildings like a mosquito.
The people on the street stare.
A building absorbs us like a needle. “We’ve regained control,” says the pilot,
but we’re trapped inside the buildings. The bricks squeeze us like jelly.
Behind us, they reform in neat lines. Clean mortar. The noise is unbearable.
The pilot steers through the bricks. I pray to you.
The walls scream around us. “Hold tight,” says the pilot.
We emerge in a field in Pennsylvania. There are yellow flowers. Our glass windows
shatter on the ground. The grass smells like puddles. I still hold my breath.
A staircase unfolds. Everyone laughs about our shaky legs.
My friend kisses the pilot to tumultuous applause.
I climb down the stairs alone. The plane smokes slightly.
Even in this familiar light, you are gone.
Bonus Cut 