Quarry Cub Sunset

Let’s love each other 
but never meet 
in the middle 

like a child’s hands
enjoying the polarity of  
powerful magnets. 

Eamon Keane is a poet and short fiction writer from Minnesota living in Bogotá.

Ode to Pteromerhanophobia

Word like a dirt packed mouth,
tongue forced strike of roof in gasp,
throat impinged in resonance akin 
to being buried alive:
Pteromerhanophobia.

Name as fitting as fear, chemicals
rush right past frayed nerve to terror—
There is no escaping an hour.
Who doesn’t watch birds stretch wing
and yearn to fly? Pity of a fear, really,
world gathered up in pleats and yet,

Everywhere is possible but my mind.

I do it anyway.
Walk through the terminal upright.
Like guaranteed, all semi-composure 
until I lose earth again and must await 
its return. 

Now there is nothing to do but crouch dread,
sight cased in small, oval haze. I learn
to antedate a din: a whistle of slacked wing, 
a jolt of pitched roll, an obtuse mechanical tremor, 
a turbine’s undulating moan.

We climb space to outlandish altitude
and I stalk particular precipice,
the place of cut engine where life really knots 
into one hundred bodies or more. 

And it occurs: somewhere between 
two and five thousand feet we are freed of some impetus 
and begin to drift. We hover sky’s curve and watch atmosphere
level—bird’s scale, Earth anonymous.

Air compresses instrument and up rises buoyant longing: 
an earth I wish to know. I plot it in section: 
circle, square, and shapeless contour,
everything manmade turned microscopic blemish—
man’s toils condensed to misshapen pools
and drab pitched roofs, lame blots on given majesty.

The architects remain unseen but are assumed 
marching, authoritative, to nowhere.
And to all of them I am bound! 
Even those I wish to disregard—
even to that withdrawn woman in 13b averting 
my pleading, panicked gaze.

Fear is really just a strain of struck epiphany: 
testimony of beating life. That is, until the fuel wanes; 
velocity is relentless, we cannot drift space for long. 
Matter must move: to hell 
with sudden ease and false confidence.

There is descent and well-worn panic. 
We approach ground in rapid fall to prayer: 
God, deliver me to Earth!
Which heaves larger now to swallow whole,
gulping green trees and jagged mountain terror, 
an ocean swelling vacuum—

a clucking drum, a mantra seeking moor:
though never closer to the living than 
when poised to crush from above…

Elizabeth Haddad works as a content writer and has a Substack called In Praise of Thought.