Flight

for Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

She’s scuttling up and down the aisle like Barbie on speed and I try not to heed
the panic riding my skin like a thousand electric eels, each pore poised for assault and my mouth a desert while the sleeping Texan next to me smiles in a dream distant as a lone star from the impending doom. But this is nothing like that flight home from Asheville when the 50-seater
bucked and snorted through clouds and the girl by the window prayed the Sh’ma, her thin bell of a voice breathless, while you giggled and recited the last line of your Ghazal You could seduce God himself and fuck the sexless angels. A month later, the night I heard you died I dreamt a broken fence lay scattered like grey bones crushing the chrysanthemums, but next morning, no wreckage littered the lawn, only autumn leaves ablaze on the ground resisting for a little while browning into solitary surrender. I imagine you somewhere surrounded by saffron and silk, sitting cross-legged and glowing as you did in the classroom insisting on revising everything, even this elegy, delighted by the hundreds no thousands of angels and the soft caress of their feathers like poems on your bare feet.

BABO KAMEL

Babo Kamel’s work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Lily, CV2, Poet Lore, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020, among other places. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. Her chapbook After was published by Finishing Line Press and her book What the Days Wanted by Broadstone Books.