Heading into unbreakable cloud piñatas
in the good-crazy clock-world,
we go back in time, allowing
the kissing teens in the seats ahead
to seal a deathless past and enter
the next one as ALIVE & IN-LOVE,
which should but doesn't sink behind
in the contrails of an empire failing
by its ongoing optimism spoken with
a hand over a heart. It all lingers a little
on those locked mouths up ahead where
May waits, fading into the past's future,
this cargo more precious than we've ever
been, or will be, as we land upon our land.
Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017) and Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016).
