TANDEM HANG-GLIDING INCIDENT

An anniversary gift, her first time doing it
Lenami Godinez-Avila, 27, hugged the pilot
from behind as instructed, ran with him
awkwardly to the edge and stepped
into the wind-tug beyond anyone’s reach—

her harness not clipped on. She fell
like Icarus a thousand feet, melting
from sight with the pilot’s shoes
into a sea of limbs webbed with leaves
down, down to the forest floor.

Her boyfriend, filming it,
stopped. Love screamed
through the air as he ran down
Mt. Woodside to find her.
Until he did, there was hope.

The pilot glided back to an open
mouthed crowd, to his twelve
year old daughter watching,
and swallowed the memory
card onboard. His fiftieth birthday.

Who hasn’t known each of them
in dreams?—where we fall without
falling, see what can’t be happening,
get to creatively escape a bad scene.
And wake relieved, our lives still

hanging by a thread of assumptions.

This poem won IthacaLit’s  2016 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize, as judged by Allison Joseph and was published New Year’s Day 2017. The prize came with a generous purse ($1000) and offered a huge thumbs-up when most needed. Sad to say, the magazine recently folded. Both the nutshell poem of the previous post and this one were drafted about the same time. I couldn’t give either of them up – for anyone following this blog, I’d be interested to know if one version appeals over the other.