Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
The Aerodynamics
The night she walked to the house
she held a string; on the other end,
fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.
Wind provided the aerodynamics.
Does every collaboration
need to be explained?
She tied the string to the mailbox
left the kite to float until morning.
Every night this happens.
She sleeps, I listen, darkness
slides through us both.
The next morning
the string still curved into the sky
but the kite was gone.
This was the morning
newspapers announced
the Mona Lisa was stolen.
This was the morning
it snowed in Los Angeles,
the morning I wore gloves
to pull from the sky
fifty-three feet of frozen string.
Rick Bursky’s most recent collection is* I’m No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance* (BOA Editions, 2015). His next, Where the Ocean Spills Its Grief, is forthcoming from BOA. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Harvard Review, FIELD, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. (updated 4/2018)