Rebecca Oet (Solon, Ohio) is the winner of two silver medals in the National Scholastic Writing Awards, the River of Words Youth Poetry Grand Prize, the VOYA Magazine’s Teen Poetry Contest, and the Young Poets Network Short Poems challenge. Her work appears in Constellations, Abstract Magazine, Dunes Review, Grub Street, Qwerty, Columbia College Literary Review, Silk Road, The McNeese Review, Healing Muse, Tears in the Fence, Forge, Rosebud, and many others. Rebecca has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2019 and Best American Poetry 2019 Anthologies.

flightless birds

Robecca Oet

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1.

every time I cough the plane coughs with me

           exhaust a little stronger little dirtier

seats and seats and seats chop the cabin

           crooked like teeth, hungry like a mouth

with every person that gets on I get a little heavier

           I can feel them all sitting in my gut

the older woman sitting to my left isn’t sleeping

           I am watching her watch the sky

we are a bird in the sky, slow, but not vacant

           I want us to be a flamingo

the plane hums and I hum along with it

           the hum is not sleepy, the hum is alive

surrounded by sky, surrounded by people

           we are lonely

2.

flamingos and pink shrimp and styrofoam peanuts

           my eyes are screwed, and I am dreaming of pink

a mother has a green pillow around her neck and her baby is crying

           the mother is also crying

my mother left me here, not forever, but the plane is shaking

           I am shaking and the woman next to me says nothing

there is another plane on the opposite side of the world

           we are digging parallel lines into the sky

3.

at home my brother tells me flamingos can’t fly

           I lift my arms and beat them against the air

I stand there for hours flapping, eyes closed

           I lift my legs one at a time

I point my toes and bend my knees

           I pretend that I am flying