FIGHTERS, Continued
like she was practicing a dance step,
that he tried holding back but he
lost it, began dividing into light…
but I didn’t
have the heart to tell him
Valerie had already filled me in
about the light back in high school,
but he must have figured it out pretty quick
because two seconds later he’s over Korea
strafing gunships and something
goes wrong, his engine quits,
and all of a sudden the harbor’s
coming up like a runaway train but
all he can think about is his mother, how as a kid
he got up one night, saw her sitting in the kitchen
throwing up on the table cloth, and then he’s going down the displays and buttons and switches like his fingers
are leaving his hands, hearing himself or
someone sounding like him, saying Easy now,
no fuck-ups, lay it down, and then
all he could see was the water
streaming past his eyes like the hissing
of millions of veins and then
something inside him snapped
and all of a sudden he’s high up
on the ceiling of his mother’s kitchen,
naked, arms outstretched, trying
to tell her he’s OK, but she keeps
fiddling with the tablecloth and then
she looks up at the ceiling like maybe
she heard something, but he could tell
by her eyes she kept looking right through him
like he wasn’t really there.
.