Landing
by Lee Peterson
for Dan Murphy
There was the time I came by train
to Montclair from the city, to your family’s
grand house, in the dark. Loss hanging
in the wide spaces between bodies, the wide
rooms. Your mother’s cold beauty. Her pearls.
After, you left the last mourners to drive me back
to the station, in boxers, a beer between your
thighs. The red Porsche speeding along
broad, silent streets. The engine’s soft hum,
a violent precision. That same winter we sat
in my parents’ apartment, in a state of want.
We made small talk in the kitchen. The charged
air awkward above the Mexican tile.
When it was good between us, there were
the slanted walls of your off-campus apartment.
Your futon on the floor. February’s white
sky flat through the unshaded windows.
The tumbling of our bodies in their blind,
radiant youth. I read you Hopkins under blankets
afterward, laughed at the way you threw me around.
You said, “You like it.” And I did.
Years passed and we'd fallen out of touch.
I heard you’d become a journalist. I married
someone else. He’d left. Boarding a flight
to Frankfurt, one summer night en route to
Srebrenica, to sleep in a murdered boy’s room
a decade after a genocide, I saw you
walking in my direction. Those brown curls.
Pug nose. That strut. A wink in your eyes.
On board, a row to yourself, you asked
did I want to join you. And I did. Once we reached
35,000 feet, our bodies pressed close across
the armrest. The air was rough all seven hours.
I drank to take my mind off the turbulence.
You held my hand, loosely. Told me about your work
for the Monitor, about corkscrew descents
into Kabul airport. The planes’ tight turns—
so no big guns got lucky. About your sister’s suicide
the year before, about your villa digs in Cairo.
The dinner service complete. The cabin lights low.
I pretended to sleep along your muscled arm,
pretended to ignore your fingers tracing
my corduroyed thigh. Somewhere over the Atlantic
I ached to move closer, to breach the metal bar
between us. But didn’t. Justine tells me you settled
someplace green and growing, with a woman
who brought you back from war, from the things
you’ll never tell. Someone who keeps you near.
But on that day in July, in Frankfurt, a cathedral of glass
and white framed our final parting. The two of us
like model figures, dwarfed under the domed architecture,
the attendant airspace. Our feet squared, facing off
on the wide blue carpet. At least that’s how I remember it.
My flight to Sarajevo about to board. The pulse of want
so strong between us still—circled, turned, found
no clear place to land.
“In Newark Airport on my way to attend a ten-year commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide, I ran into an ex-boyfriend, Dan Murphy, at the gate. At the time, he was living in the Middle East and covering the war in Iraq as a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor.” —Lee Peterson
Lee Peterson’s first collection of poems, Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia (Kent State University Press), is a post-conflict examination of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Her forthcoming collection, In the Hall of North American Mammals (Cider Press Review), focuses on life and light coming in, on mothering a girl child in a precarious world, on how we navigate love, fear, risk, and hope.