As I took my flight into eternity
the thieving pilot's gated voice led me from the speakers,
causing me to put my safety belt back on
for take off.

I stirred my cheap airline coffee,
sipped at it,
spilled a bit on my shirt,
which blossomed
brown and stolid.

I read the instructions
on my complimentary packet of peanuts.

open packet.
eat nuts.

read my crunchy travel guide,
my book to survival
in case my hunger got the better of my brain,
consuming instinct
and restricting me from nourishing myself.

The nose of the plane was stewardess-
less; no one stood,
reading off safety instructions
from a plastic handbook.

The cart came into view from behind the dark curtain,
my eyes reflected in its legs,
in its polished, burnished steel,
in its brass fixings, licking at cans of soda
and at plastic boxes of sandwiches.

Human heads stayed fixed in their seats,
not caring to examine the shine of new birth,
the shine of food in the brown eyes of hunger.
One brassy woman touched the cart-pusher
on the arm;
the cart-pusher dropped quiet eyes to the cart
and smoothly passed Brassy a soda.

Brassy offered no thanks.
(I wondered,
twisted
my packet of peanuts like hard candy,
the idea that her silence was his fault.)
A snowy child touched the cart-pusher
as he moved down the aisle,
and the cart-pusher slid a soda
into Snowy's palm, smiling sincerely.

The snowy child giggled up at him.
(I twisted,
wondered
like a fish at the other side of the bowl,
if the child's smile was his fault.)
My partner, my fat businessman,
round like a watch face,
checked his unmoving, moving, unmoving hands
before tapping the cart-pusher.
The cart-pusher handed him a soda,
eyes only a misted idea in my vision,
and Fatty glared down at the can, wrinkling his nose
like the piles of laundry
I used to have
scattered dismally, bored across my bedroom floor.

The fat business man turned his face away,
to the window,
to the empty glass.
I tugged at the sides of my packet of peanuts
(wondering if the hostility
was the cart-pusher's fault:
wondering if it was my fault:
wondering if it was fault of the airline)

and it burst with cosmic energy:

I was seven, seven years old and crying
next to a fallen, crippled bicycle in the road.

My cat was dead and being eaten by maggots,
which became knives, chopping onions.
The cat?
Onions.

My mother had chopped a lot of onions,
but only when she cried--

I looked up from my shredded peanut-
less packet,
and God, pushing the cart
filled with beverages down the aisle,
looked down at me sternly from his high heels
and handed me a complimentary packet of peanuts.