Red-eye

Wake up in harsh lighting,
startled by an announcement.
There is a sudden shift from
eight hours of sitting
to scurrying about your seat.
Pull bags down from bins,
drag suitcases through the aisle,
force your body in a single file
pressed into the jet bridge and push forward
until the tunnel opens up before you.
Welcome to the bright new world
of intercoms and fluorescence.

What to do first? Wait in the coffee line.
Find nourishment. Hydrate.
Bear any last minute cancellation.
Keep going and going
until you reach a soft bed
and a door that shuts out the world.
A transfer is merely a stop
in a city you will never see.
So find an empty chair by the gate.
Breathe in as the first rays of sun
tease your eyes through the window.
An ambient voice is telling you now:
it is time to leave this plane for another.

Memorial, over Zoom

For Ernie

We show up from wherever we are:
the front seat of a car,
a kitchen with an offscreen child,

a windowed living room
in Glen Burnie, bright green
elm trees swaying.

Here is a mosaic formed
of every person you’ve touched.
We look to each other

to glimpse moments of you.
Restoring your story,
we fill it with kindness,

your infectious laugh,
and your giving heart.
When a speaker wraps up,

there is a brief pause.
We each look away as if
to see your face,
just offscreen.

Jonathan Lewis is the author of Babel On, winner of the Lines + Stars Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series contest. He is editor of the Federal Poet, a recipient of a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowship, and a winner of the Golden Haiku award. His poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Hawai’i Review, the Washington Post, and other publications. He lives in Alexandria, VA.

Image: Andrew Choy from Santa Clara, California, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons