Our descent, wiped through the cloud deck.
Straight-backed school children, eyes forward.
We are well behaved. We are good.
We say it is fine
to be human, to depend on steel
for buoyancy. Our spines
radio signals below, to the lives
we have lived, sloughed
from each of our bodies like ghosts
left behind. In this city,
an orchard of starlight below,
a thousand glassine
you’s and me’s wait in all the rooms
we’ve ever been in. As we, aloft,
watch the seatbelt signs
line up in single file constellations
pointing the way home, back into
the warm sheaf of selves
that will sleep, tonight, a body
once in attendance again.
