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It was after midnight
and still
when we hit the worst of it
the man next to me
looked out the window
which confused me—
was he expecting to see
the thick thermal energy radiating
from the desert, did he think he would see
the pockets of hot oxygen
forming spinning fists ready
to throw us out of the pitch black sky?
The ice in our glasses leaped
onto the floor, and another man said
Oh Jesus.
I heard him slide
up the plastic veil
to see what death might look like
from the air. But what scared me
the most, was that earlier, when it was still
light, and we were all smooth and breathing
easy, a little girl had pointed
to the thick white canopy of clouds
and said Look Mommy
Heaven.
We’re in Heaven.
ALIEN
When I pulled your shirt off
over your head, and you unclipped
your bra and threw it to the carpet,
my eyes hung on your small breasts.
I didn’t know how
to touch you, to let myself
be touched. I didn’t understand
how my mouth could ache
for yours when at first I couldn’t even tell
if you were a man or a woman,
and once I knew, how it still could be
that I needed to dig my nails into my palms
in order to keep from reaching for you.
I tried not to look at your breasts above me
and at first you touched me like they didn’t exist,
like you were any other man and then, testing, hovering
over you, your legs around my waist
I found that this was what it must be like
to inhabit someone else. Or perhaps
to more fully inhabit yourself, to reveal
some embryonic body within, wet
with eyes half closed, capable of doing
things you swore you never would.
And even when your nipples grazed my belly
and I felt how far I had been thrown
from my former life, how alien, startled,
I knew that your body, its stippling and soft edges
did not matter at all. Some separate set of eyes
crawled out of me on all fours, stood before you,
and began to learn the world.