JANE (1973)

Nothing about Jane was plain.
From winsome flight attendant
to wife, and soon divorced
from a cheating spouse
who ran away with another
woman. She rested her eyes
as she stood in the galley,
her head against a wall.
The plane dipped. Lights
flickered in the aisle,
a figure as pale
as the dead sang and danced,
          Angels, Archangels he outstripped1
          salt grips the road and awaits his lift again,
          street orange glow shades the odds against.2
At twenty-six, she returned
to work in mustard-colored
wool and a matching cape—
the standard uniform. She grew
her hair long like before.
Once a passenger commented
that she was the living incarnation
of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele.

1From Christina Rosetti, “The Convent Threshold”
2From Stereophonics, “Not Up to You”

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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.