Two by Two Degrees
The Big Man at Kitty Hawk sprays over the intercom: I have
a big plane. Big. It’s a big plane and it’s perfect.
The tarpaulin flexes against the aluminum while the hazard flags
keel over on the beach. Trust me, I’m going to be your pilot,
he rattles, you
love me. My father was a pilot, I have
a natural instinct for it. I know more about flying
than Orville Redenbacher.
Sand cliffs tumble into surf up and down
Jockey’s Ridge and eyes of all manner of dune creatures
in the queue go wide.
The engine coughs bicycle wheels into motion
as the haggard menagerie takes its seats. Two hounds
can’t take the diesel fumes and whine at the lever
in the exit row.
Padding past the bulkhead, the Big Man muses why
would you want to get off my big, beautiful plane?
At the captain’s chair he has eyes only
for the red lever. He cranks us all aloft, thirty, fifty,
three hundred cubits.
A bush baby clutches his rosary as the craft
rises into thunderheads and immediately
some among us start to drop.
The salamanders holding hands in the aisle careen
through the window, two tigers and a crab and I swear
I saw a flying fish plummet through the floorboards.
Two dials start to smoke and the Big Man grabs
a branch off the olive tree in coach to beat against
the dashboard. Sweat builds on his brow,
makes broken rainbows on the shattered glass
and the Big Man at Kitty Hawk wheezes into the intercom: Boy
it’s hot in here, how do you turn on the A/C?
Bradley Allf is an ecologist, science writer and postdoctoral fellow at North Carolina State University. He studied poetry for his undergraduate thesis at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill under Gaby Calvocoressi. His work has appeared in Smithsonian, Discover, Scientific American, and many other publications. He lives in the Colorado Front Range.
Header image generated by AI, courtesy Adobe Photoshop.
