Susan Anthony

Susan Anthony, named after the old suffrage movement leader, boarded a plane for Singapore, not intending to come back. Through the gate, down the walk, and into her seat, she sighed contently that America and the past would be quickly 20,000 feet below and then an inseparable gulf behind her.

As soon as the plane was airborne, she ordered a glass of wine, then asked instead for a coke, then changed her mind and ordered a diet coke, then thought again and asked for a water. "Today is a day for changes," she smiled to herself, "and why not? Whatever this new life holds for me, I'll face it undrugged." She resolved herself to vegetarianism and water for the duration of the flight. "And my life. The rest of my life."

She sat windowside and by some act of the love of the God, she thought, she had a free seat next to her. The only empty seat on the plane and it was her buffer zone from the rest of the passengers. Her carry-on only contained a cell-phone and a copy of Les Fleurs du mal in the French, which she could barely read. She flipped open to the near the middle of the book, to the middle of a poem and read this:

La gerbe épanouie
En mille fleurs,
Où Phoebé réjouie
Met ses couleurs,
Tombe comme une pluie
De larges pleurs.

"It sounds wonderful. I wish I had spent more time...no, energy, or attention, or something, to French." She had a rough idea of the meaning, and could pronounce each word with a rough accent, though any Parisian would know that her tongue had not learned those sounds until adulthood. "Why didn't I spend more time on it? What was I doing for all those years?" Her questions, spoken aloud though softly, went unanswered. The people around her were now sleeping or plugged into the movie. "This is how it always was. Me alone, but I never had time for myself. How does that happen to a person?" She read the poem's lines again and sighed.

It didn't matter, of course, since America and her past had dropped into the depths below her, and as she looked out the window still saying those words, the ocean came up and the land fell away. "Ahh, now I'm truly gone."

She opened her cell phone and pressed the power button, began to wait for it to load. Within seconds, the stewardess was hovering over her, admonishing her that she couldn't use it while in flight. Susan apologized and made it put it away - the stewardess began to move up the aisle - then reopened it dialed a number that she had memorized. "Today is a day for changes," she whispered, and also "How does that, or this, happen to a person?" She pressed Send.

The sheaf unfolds into
Countless flowers
In which joyful Phoebe
Puts her colors:
It drops like a shower
Of heavy tears.

-Charles Baudelaire

Two Haikus

Cats scratch at the door
keep us from sleeping all night
I retaliate.

This gray wet morning
I find the dog ate their food
I apologize.

Either A Lie Then Or A Lie Now

In these later days too, full
of the easy battle,
pipes and languages
and whisky, we carried on until the next day

Myself, flicking round the edge-circle, a drop of solder
waiting on the next licking snap to turn me silver
Christ also bored; patience for the unknowable hour;
brow lifted heaven-ward, waiting on the Father.

And then we found out
what we had forgot about:
the heavy gut-drop of loss
and abiding ourselves forgotten