Gary Beaumier has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest

Once I shuffled along the wings of biplanes
I know this because I always fall in my dreams
from very high and unsurvivable places
tugged inexorably toward cliffs
by some invisible force or
tumbling off high buildings

When I get old and rickety
like those planes
I’ll take one burst of wind too many
and collapse mid flight impossibly high
guy wires slackened
trailing struts or tail fins as they are loosed
spinning rapidly toward a thicket of trees

Maybe my last words will be, “Hello Icarus
I should have known I could only stay aloft so long”
and all the wing walkers said the same
but wasn’t it nice to have escaped the pull of gravity
those many times
and finally when the pilot cuts the engine
we drifted down through a soundless world
by the grace of the wings
in that rarefied place
only we knew

Gary Beaumier is the author of two books of poetry, From My Family to Yours published through Finishing Line Press and Dented Brown Fedora published by Uncollected Press. He has been a boat builder, a teacher, a garbage man, a bookstore manager and a gandydancer, amongst many other occupations. He once taught poetry in a women’s prison.