It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!
— Yingqi Lu
It was one of those cases that required panoramic vision:
Look straight ahead: a gilded wall
Look from above: a sun-tanned field. two star-shaped
dents, our bodies
mistaken as golden.
I said so let the sky be our
testimony. But testimonies required
proof, & the sky had no shutter. A flock
of wild geese chevroned by, what say we
strap you to the back of one of them, you proffered,
pinning my arms up high. A human
drone is the next best thing to a bird’s eye view.
Up there, I felt ugly. Not streamlined enough to be a plane,
Nor ethereal enough to be a bird.
But you called me your mid-western Icarus,
your makeshift deity, & made me angel
hair pasta for early dinner, tossed in grass plucked
from your driveway that we
pretended to be fancy herbs. All night, I stared at the angel
strands stuck in the strainer,
flaxen like us
up against the sun.
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