popcorn
it’s afternoon on an august friday and we’re on the runway, brother sleepy, airpods shared between two heads. we are heading home after nine years and my dad is light, unweighted with the buoyancy of return. the clouds cluster like popcorn, like kentucky fried chicken or matzo ball soup or the gunk after a smoothie, mashed potato with the saturation turned down.
i could take a spoonful of its stiff meringue and the crystals would melt quickly, tasteless like youthful snow on a glitzy winter afternoon. the sun glints off pieces scattered like glass in the sand, earth neat like a CPU board. above in the distance stand towers, large empires that will never be reached, never to be seen by human eyes up close.
i wonder how long it would take for a person to tumble down out of the scale of the sky, if the plane and its belly can slice through the atmosphere like a knife through jello. my brother leans over to peer out the window in time to see two other planes the size of birds and we wave. we are cheerful for any such extraterrestrial contact in an otherwise empty world.