Author: 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.

Jane 15

JANE (2056)

On a day unlike today, with a sky-blackened gray
stands an oak with branches hovering like hands
holding the storm away. This tree grows now
on John’s Island in South Carolina. There has been folk
who have said this oak is filled with specters. It’s true.

Yet no one is sure. No one has seen these seraphim—
it has always been simply conjectured. To be set free
from this tree, one would need the Godspeed of an angel.
From the ground, not a sound can be heard, not
from up high, not from a bird. In this grim tree
is a wicked banshee or a welcomed pet to a single eaglet.

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Jane 6

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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Jane 7

JANE (1986)

I dreamt
I was
a weightless ribbon
an astronaut
alight
in a lilac hurricane     of sunlight
                    on the first morning
of flight
I am alone
in the warring morning
with a lit cigarette
I flick it off a bridge
when my flesh gives in
high               above a lagoon of lights
past traffic
past freeway
do not enter
into the past
I stare and watch cars everywhere
stuck
together all over town
I am                in love
with rows of planets
and comets
coming into view
toward a queue of clouds
I am drunk
on this highway we loved
a boom of smog
meets me                then a tensile curve of the road
a forest of homes rise
with lilies
to meet us
               I’m tired of being told
the world won’t be worth much
in a million years
though it can’t be true
or must never be
how difficult
it must be           in this body
believe me           in this flesh
watch                    this car fly
in the distance
cargo ships sail
we fly               well past tomorrow
like a god
through the night
thick with stars

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Jane 12

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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Jane 11

JANE (1987)

I’m in first class, so I pay her no attention until she changes
her tone. She ran off with a man who wasn’t her own? Betting
double or nothing—she was a whale of a player who dazzled
the birds every summer and fall. Vegas is where her husband
once lived with Rock whom he met shortly after and soon
began to spend the night with him secretly huffing. She’d come
home early one afternoon and found them post-coitus, spoon to spoon.

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Jane 16

JANE (1967)

It was her last red-eye with a DC-7 owl comet flight.

She departed the Eight Avenue Line at the Central Park West stop. Most of the streetlamps were out or broken. It was a stormy night in July. The bars were closing.

From around the corner came a song, and she sang along. Please allow me to introduce myself. ¹ A film crew was setting up across the street at the Dakota apartments.

Please allow me to introduce myself. As she stepped onto the curb, a gun, a poco moto, came toward her. The sound of the music grew. When I saw it was a time for a change Killed Tsar and his ministers. Anastasia screamed in vain.

¹Lyrics taken from “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones

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