The fabrication of aircraft components generally involves the joining of one part of the component to another.
southwest *tehran, a road carved from mother, earth, circular blades of grass bow & roll – a goat, a dog, a dead oak tree, the crackling of skin/aluminum. i can [barely] make out an opening beneath layers of decomposing [dreams] a process that uses up all the oxygen above 1,000 feet. 176 souls rain down, drifting past rooftops before sinking deep into red [pyrocumulus] clouds. the following day, rescuers find hundreds of shoes/ruts where passengers [bodies] are planted next to old scientific equipment, a santa doll & a go-pro, footage still intact, but a black box recorder is no longer viable. in a yard, further west they find the outlines of hands on a window & the head a child who had been lost in a hole, nothing survives the punctured night sky. as weeping relatives gather, our country doubts our love for story. no one investigates the wisps of smoke. it was an accident. how many times can you break open the world, piece it back together without failure [catastrophic]? lined up, one by one, body bags like matchsticks are waiting for the snap of wings.
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Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in WSQ, Chiron Review, Juxtaprose, The Rumpus, Plainsongs, and I-70 Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from California Institute of the Arts.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
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