JANE (1982)

One night we left at sunset from Reykjavik
to Boston, a fourteen-hour flight.

In first class, as passengers slept,
frost collected on the windows.

In descent,
the plane began to weep.

On the runway, the ground crew collected
cargo of confetti from an Airborne Express 767.

From the passenger lounge came a congregation of voices—
laughing and talking, rising and falling with the plane.

On the radio, a commercial interrupted for Girl Scouts—a new perfume
by Elizabeth Arden, with the scent of chocolate chips.

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by Ruben Quesada

Ruben Quesada is the editor of a hybrid collection, Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry. He is the author of Revelations and Next Extinct Mammal: Poems. His writing appears in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kirkus Review, and Harvard Review. He has served as an editor for AGNI, PANK, The Rumpus, and Pleiades and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University-Los Angeles and for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.