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Bob Hicok

Full Flight

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top

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Translator's Note

There is a tradition in Laparone that the first
man to wake each morning must sweep
shadows from his porch lest night
pull the long limbs of sunlight
into its mouth and devour the day.
Serto wants to be the broom melting dark
and light in the moment of their divorce.
This teases the translator with a feast
of moral and technical difficulties. For
example. There is a widely chattered rumor
that the arm Serto lost in the last battle
for Muipo, now passed by Zedefi rebels
from base to base in the Chimasta mountains,
reverts to his body in dream and chokes him
to death, his last breath the word benudok.
In Kuntolo this means something like traitor/
savior. The aspiration, for which there is no
simple English equivalent, in fact no
comparable word in the Romance “pallet,”
is to hold in one unit of language the complex

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