Back to Issue Eighteen.

the multiverse at 36,000 feet

BY VERONICA KUHN

 

In one, ashes fill the engine’s bursting lungs.
In another, a skein of geese clouds the cockpit.

The tonic water trembles in its plastic cup,
or lightning strikes, and a child won’t stop

howling. “Look out the window,”
the mother coos. Most emptiness is blue

and open. I gain some awareness
of my own ribcage, empty, tightly webbed

with tendons. Each body flickers. First
is an egg poised on the edge of a bowl,

then carbon is arranged in a diamond.
I read this thriller, say, the newlyweds die

in an air crash over Phuket, but in the end
both step out of the plane like a trick, fully whole.

There is a universe where each person is calming
the snarl of a tiger by reaching past its tiger-teeth

to study the gape of its tiger-throat.

Veronica Kuhn works as a documentation writer in Houston, Texas. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in CutBankSonora Review, and DIAGRAM.

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