Audience of Ex Girlfriends by Terry Trowbridge

I cannot see the horizon in your eyes.

I can only overlook you, my love,

Only overlap your cries with my cries.

-Marc di Saverio (2013). Sanatorium Songs, 46.

 

A pilot learns to navigate ad misericordia

by levelling the control wheel and rolling his eyes skyward.

 

The zodiac above him ruins empires and trips calendar pages.

Fresh paper arrives, charted with empty squares.

Weekly sequences begin to repeat themselves.

The pilot is thankful for autopilot, the unthinking plans

for a route that ignores autobiography,

routes the fly despite self-knowledge.

 

Another trip and nothing changes.

The pilot returns by reversing the route.

He knows the terrain he never touches.

He is maples. He makes no adjustments.

He ha forgotten the last time he made touchdown

and cannot recall what his own craft’s tail looks like.

 

Over and over again he flies,

over what it does not matter.

About the Poet:

Pushcart Prize nominee, researcher & farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poems are inPennsylvania Literary Journal, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Kolkata Arts, Leere Mitte, untethered, Snakeskin Poetry, Progenitor, Miracle Monocle, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows, Muleskinner, Brittle Star, MathematicalIntelligencer, Journal of HumanisticMathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Synchronized Chaos, Indian Periodical, Delta Poetry Review, Literary Veganism and ~100 more. His lit crit is in BeZine, Erato, The /t
Ɛmz/ Review, Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, StudiesinSocialJustice, Rampike, Seeds, and The/t3mz/Review.  His Erdös number is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first 2 writing grants.