Layover
A poem
By Chris Stewart
People pour like cells pouring through a permeable mesh
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Like Leiningen’s ants, hurling themselves onto their floating dead to span the gasoline moat
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People wash through corridors like kitchen scraps pushed by mop water
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They rumble along travelators, children running spectacularly backwards, suited women holding back reproaches for them, knuckles wrapped around their suitcase pushbars
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Gates open and close like the subtle mouths of coral
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Shoes are unfastened with a shake of the tired head and belts are pulled through their loops anxiously as laptops clatter in the hard plastic of the bins
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Children scuttle for a look at the supersonic monitors that the x-ray stationeers scan with their adult eyes
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People grasp the rail of the stairs that lead to the small opening on the great metallic tube, they will show their small card and look out for their number and letter
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Then to be raised from the ground by unknown propulsive roaring burst
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And to drift, arcing over the sweet, blank, puzzle-piece earth
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Through wet clouds
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Shuttled through the highest channels of the earth’s body like small pearls of medicine in a see-through pharmaceutical capsule
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People wash out, stiffer, less patient, wracking their jaws and swallowing to open their ears
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They are brought into a new place and sat down
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They are given questions to answer
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Fortunately none of them involve explaining how on earth they actually flew
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Or else nobody would ever make it past customs
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Save aeronautic engineers and very intelligent trivialists
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Which, frankly — let’s try that, actually.
