By Hannah Star Rogers
Dear FAA,
This possibility really never occurred to me. I knew it
could happen, but I assumed I would be at home.
I pictured my own comforter, my own ringed tub.
Certainly I thought I could stretch out. The woman
on the plane beside me works for you. She’s a wildlife
biologist and she takes away all the food birds might like
around airports so your flocks don’t encounter their flocks.
She grew up in Brussels but met an American professor
on sabbatical. She’s asleep now, with her blond dreadlock-beads
clicking against the window. She already told me how
she is glad she didn’t have children because it makes her transfer
from Denver to Miami much easier. I guess I don’t look pregnant
to her and in a few hours I won’t be. Was this your way
of preparing me?
About the Author:
Hannah Star Rogers grew up in rural Alabama and received her Ph.D. at Cornell University. She teaches at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. Her poems, flash fiction, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Nat. Brut, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has received the Djerassi Artist Residency in Woodside, California, both the Everglades and Acadia National Park Service writing residencies, and the ArtHub International Artist Residency in Kingman, Arizona. Her current manuscript, American Letters, inquires about the relationship between the personal and the bureaucratic, between our ideals, hopes, loves, and worries about America and the consequences of dealing with its institutions.