Now Boarding at Gate A12 by Rich Boucher

Image | Jonas F

Now Boarding at Gate A12

 

I keep my eyes peeled,

watch for shapes on the horizon.

I take out my earbuds,

put my head to the ground

and hope the truth will grow up into me.

I crouch low and grip the silver smooth rail

with my hand; let me see if 

I can tell when the train is close.

 

There is a day I am thinking about,

a blue moon occurrence at the airport of recent memory.

It could have been a man running

to catch up with a woman who lost her wallet

because he found it, because it was right to be kind.

It could have been one stranger

comforting another upon learning their reason for the flight. 

what it actually was on this particular day

was a woman of about seventy, weary,

walking a golden retriever puppy in one direction past Gate A12

just as some other mother, exhausted,

with her three girls were coming from the other direction 

and barreling headlong towards Gate A12:

they say lightning travels from the ground up

but I think the clouds and the pitchforks of fearsome blue flame

prefer to meet each other halfway,

and I know flying on an airplane can be a scary thing for a child.

I know flying on an airplane can be scary for a grown man.

It can be scary, too, for sure, for an animal. 

If it goes down, I’ll come back to life just to spite 

the ugly orange fuselage and sea-worthy cushions:

this is the way I ingest and process uncooked fear.

If only you could have seen the scene that day with my eyes

and heard the sweet cacophony, the high-pitched delight in those girls

as the older woman allowed them to pet the sweet little dog. 

After all parties went their separate ways 

I’ve got to imagine tension alleviated,

fears traded even a little bit for a happenstance measure of happiness.

I stood there in reverence, aquamarine azure for that moment;

I’ve got it in my pocket and it isn’t going anywhere.

What is living if it isn’t the always invisible 

dance of choice and chance? Call it the dark pas de deux.

In the spirit realm within my head,

I take the dice in my palm,

ask the beautiful lady beside me to blow on them for good luck,

then toss them onto the green felt.

When they settle, everyone sees what I see:

each side of each die is completely blank,

smoothly-polished off-white possibility

where before there resided cold and definite numbers.

And because no total could be counted 

from a pair of empty dice, that meant we all won

and everyone around the table hugged

with mirthful tears to realize at last 

how easy it would be

for all of us to win.

 

And still I keep my eyes peeled,

watch for shapes on the horizon.

I take out my earbuds,

put my head to the ground

and hope the truth will grow up into me.

I crouch low and grip the silver smooth rail

with my hand; let me see if 

I can tell when the train is close. 

© Rich Boucher

Rich Boucher

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy and The Rye Whiskey Review, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Pulp Literary Magazine and Eunoia Review. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me.

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