Plane Leaving a Hangar Facing Left
- Feb 19, 2021
- 2 min read
by Nicole Oquendo
When I was small, a small certain version of irreparable me, a tiny furnace burning, we drove, always, past the airfield where the planes lived in their tiny houses. We’d pass my favorite restaurant on the way, but the idea of free chips, that crunch, that blessing, was nothing up against the stretch of wing, always flatter than I could stretch, and even less still compared to the spin of a propeller moving so fast you couldn’t lock your eyes on one blade and track it for long.
I’d press my palms against the car window, breathing hot, a furnace, wishing to be a plane when I got big.
There wasn’t a message to draw into the glass, inside my steam. This was my dream, under each fingernail, in each strand of hair from my head down to the patches growing on my big toes.
I didn’t mean a pilot. I meant me, the plane, the only thing between my new form and the sky the understanding that evolution has its limits, but even then, oh, to punch through the back window, to feel the glass breaking, me, the plane, taking off over and over, like an artist paints the same farm, the same tree, across many seasons. Time would fit around me, a scarf, and I would settle into the air, small me.
The airfield would leave my view, the planes growing smaller and tiny and then gone in the abrupt way we call a flash but isn’t one at all, instead a subtler disappearing, like an exhale, and I still burn.
We always turned the corner down a long stretch of road, to my mother’s office. She’d step into the passenger seat, eyes forward to the man, then turn, forward to the windshield.
To be a plane. I’d fly, hot, into a museum full of landscapes. I’d crash into the sea. A plane is a beast of burden, carrying us on a dream to our end.
Nicole Oquendo is a writer and artist from Central Florida. Their poetry and prose are out in the form of a hybrid memoir and six chapbooks, including their most recent work, The Antichrist and I (Bone & Ink Press). Their full-length visual poetry collection we, animals will be released by Beating Windward Press in 2021. In the meantime, follow them on Twitter @nicoleoq and at nicoleoquendo.com.
