By Fay Dillof

Remember waiting for the flight attendant to bring you your silver dinner? Then for her to free you of it? Buckled in, in blank suspension, confusing flying east with back in time? As if later, it might be anyone you ever adored, young as when last you saw them, waiting for you when you emerge, spacewalking through the humming tunnel.

And all the while, so far from earth, impossible not to think of death. All that life down there happening, heedless of one’s departure. Was it that––

a fright in how seamlessly the film is spliced?––or the pull of some half-belief in different planet, different moons?––that got me, long ago, to sleep with someone I didn’t want, cheating on someone who, up until then, I’d fooled myself I did. Lies exploding lies. Then universes.

It’s always out there somewhere, isn’t it––the damage or potential for it, like floating space debris? Now, trembling trees, sideways rain––there’s nothing not in motion, vexed by unseen forces. Love,

like I know the moon’s, I know your face, its different phases––waxing, waning, full. And this one too––not new but the worst––dark and turned away from me. How I wish I believed in the multiverse––this life, only one articulation of some big and/or in which we get it right. And

/or, what didn’t bring me to you? You to me. We were always meant to collide. But how can it be that

Wind, wind––headlights of a passing car

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Fay Dillof’s poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, FIELD, and Green Mountains Review. Her poems have won the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize and the Dogwood Literary Prize and have been supported by a John Ciardi Scholarship from Bread Loaf, a Claudia Emerson Scholarship from Sewanee, and an Anne Bastille Residency. Dillof lives with her husband and daughter in Northern California, where she works as a psychotherapist.