Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty
Summer 2009
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On Skydiving
Nick White

There’s magic to the wind crashing against the exposed folds of my ear. The gaping mouth sliced into the side of the plane’s hull, others’ arched feet teetering back and forth before the jump, the jet engine’s mechanical heartbeat—all of it is kicked back behind me. Now, I am a ball of yarn winding and unwinding itself, a belly full of canary feathers, an open throat that has forgotten how to swallow its own saliva. The faraway ground does not yet befit the definition of “ground” but is nothing more than a quilt made colorful and almost homey by the blue-green and yellow patches from some old woman’s apron. Gravity hasn’t fully embraced my suspended body, only because it cannot find the exact crinkle in between heaven and earth I am hiding. And I lose words to moments like this when I wonder what part of me I could cut out to add to the jigsaw below. What adage I could say to the pale horseman that he hasn’t already heard before. Should I fear those embankments that crust up like dead skin? Or these gullies gorging through the bottle green valleys, marking places where water has sought (and will continue to seek) lower land? I always lose words to moments like these when I try to catch a cloud with cupped hands. When unknown words are defined, and wisdom must be candled like an egg. Moments when the lust of the fall is met with the courage to pull the chord, to allow life’s invisible claw to wrench me back up into a sky polluted with ultraviolet light.

About Nick White

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