by Eric Roy

Watching television in his boxers, Small Plane gets high
and absorbed in a documentary about an infamous airshow disaster.
A little later, on his laptop, sure enough, the Blue Angels
will be in town along with the Confederate Air Force in a week.
He thinks this a good excuse to call his daughter and invite her down.
At the airshow, the one event that draws his undivided attention
is when his daughter points to his pack, bums a cigarette for the first time.
He offers her another whenever he lights up, and together they smoke—
Small Plane and his daughter finally having a decent conversation
but in the form of quickly fading black redacted clouds.
Blue Angels begin flying overhead, and they are smoking too
with such precision Small Plane forgets why he brought his daughter.
Strangely, he’s still glad he did. What he sees up in the September afternoon:
a young man lifting upward through wild blue hallway yonder,
the whole world behind him outside a delivery room.