after Civil War (2024)
back in the wrong auditorium at amc cherry hill 24. the small one, the one that shows normal movies slanted blue. my heart is a lens through which i see the world and right now everything looks like shit. everything looks like a war-torn american suburb. in a conflict there are so many deadly collisions. of fighter jet and fighter jet. of bullet and body. ours was almost one of them. but before our bones broke against each other, the places our bodies touched were sites of pleasure, of learning. we studied happiness, side by side, in your bed. we read together before we slept.
this poem is one of many answers to the question i ask myself: what if i hadn’t transitioned?
after Richard Russell *
i was meant to be born
with wings. soft feathers &
a sharp beak—i was meant to become beautiful
long ago.(†) twenty-nine
seems like a good time
to stop dreaming. i’m going to make it
happen now.(‡) it will be unclear if i thought in advance to fly
or if it just happened, but once i’m gone i will be called
highly aerial.(§) i will be depicted
without feet.(¶)
*in 2018 Richard Russell stole a passenger aircraft from the sea-tac airport, where he worked (1)
† as a ground service agent. Russell flew the plane around mt. rainier and to the olympic range (2)
‡ before heading back to puget sound. an investigation later determined his actions were not connected with any extremist or violent movements, but found no planning (3)
§ or singular motive. many were impressed with Russell’s ability to fly the plane—during his hour-plus long flight (4) he successfully performed
¶a barrel roll. swifts were long depicted without feet: a bird that almost never lands, (5) wikipedia calls them “highly aerial.” air traffic control repeatedly encouraged Russell to land the plane—he never did (6)
1 i first learned of Russell’s flight last night on instagram when a reel came up that played an audio recording of his communications with air traffic control
2 over footage of mountains out of an airplane window. “long live skyking,” read the caption. when i opened the wikipedia page, i wept
3 and played Mirah’s “person person” on spotify. Russell was barely older than me when he died. he, like me, grew up a boy in alaska wanting to join the military. i have long considered
4 flight to be a kind of transition,
5 and birds to be a kind of transfemme
6 imagery. when i read Russell’s story, i thought “that could have been me”
