Reports Confirm the Passengers Were Alive When They Hit the Mountain
- Reports Confirm the Passengers Were Alive When They Hit the Mountain
Tell us of the bypassed heart beating in 12C, how the woman holdsa stranger's hand to the battery sewn in beneath her collarboneand says, "Feel this." Tell us of a man's ear listening across the aisle,hugging itself, a red fist long since blistered by blaze.Outside, sun just coming up. Inside, twitchy bone sacs of bats, birdsongerupting as light cracks that far jungle canopy, and monkeys, monkeys.Ten thousand feet below ours, a cat tongues last night's butter,left out and soft. We broke open the sweet folded around twopaper fortunes. One said variety. One said caution.The woman in 12C would hold that her heart needsits hidden spark, but the man demonstrates how some livethe rest of their lives with half a face rememberingits before expression. Who was itthat said our souls know one another by smell, like horses? [End Page 269]
Jenny Browne, a former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas-Austin, is the author of two collections of poems, At Once and The Second Reason, both from the University of Tampa Press. New poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, the New York Times, Three-penny Review, and Tin House. She lives in downtown San Antonio and teaches at Trinity University.
