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Above, blue darkens as it thins to an airlessness wheeling

with sparkling American junk

and magnetic brains of astronauts. We are flung

across our seats like pelts.

Some of us are eating small sandwiches.

Some of us have taken pills and are swallowing

glass after glass of gin.

We were never intended to view the curve of the earth

so they give us televisions, a film

about a man and his daughter who teach a flock

of Canada geese to fly.

Wind shear hates the sky and everything in it,

slices at right angles across the grain of currents

like a cross-cut saw.

Fog loves surprises.

We have fuel, fire, Starbuck's coffee, finite

possibilities of machinery. A pilot with human hands

and nothing for us to do, turbulence being to air

what hope is to breathing.

A property.

Far below, a light comes on in the kitchen of a farmyard

turning with its piece of the world into shadow.

Someone can't sleep

an engine noise falls around the house like snow, vapour trails

pulled apart by frontal systems locked overhead

since high school. Imagines

alien weathers that unfurl in time zones

beyond the horizon.

In-Flight Movie

Karen Solie

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translated from the Polish written by
Tomasz Różycki
Russell Thornton

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