At the Concourse End of the Sky Bridge

Discombobulated by my inability to sleep on a plane
arcing across the wind-tossed top edge of Europe,
the next thing I know we are making an unscheduled stop
and I’m in a stop-and-start line where each passenger
is being greeted in their native language by a woman
who, when I get to her (she’s smiling) says to me, Welcome
Good Morning, and I walk away marveling at not only
the urge I am feeling to return to the back of the line
so I can hear her say those same words to me over again
but also at how apparently sometimes it is the very people
who do not know us who know us better than we do.

Can I Pay Next Month What I Owe This Month?

I remember her coming to the door in her bathrobe,
how she listened as I, age ten, told her what she owed
for the newspaper delivery, how I couldn’t stop staring
at the exposed bra strap, how she shuffled off
into the kitchen to look for her checkbook, leaving me
standing in a smoky living room where on the TV
I watched as a man looked down at a woman and said,
It’s over, Helen. We’re done. We’re through. It’s finished.
When she returns she stands a little too close and
I smell a mix of lilac bushes and dirty ashtrays. Get real.
I don’t exist, Paul. Wake up. I’m no one you ever knew.
I can see between two fingers the smoldering cigarette
just removed from her mouth and on the very tip end
of the filter, the lacework ring of still-moist pink lipstick.

Having grown up on a farm in southeast Missouri, Ben Sloan has a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center and an MFA from Brooklyn College where he studied with John Ashbery. He has two poetry chapbooks, The Road Home (Thirty West Publishing House, 2017), and Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). He lives in Charlottesville, Va.