Jo Balistreri
Flying Out of Phoenix
Though we sit side by side, we are alone. Twenty thousand feet above ground, a lake of air and light, lily pads of white. We disappear … reappear over desert, mountains, and striated canyons.
I’m bundled and lost in blue fleece.
Page after page, The Lemon Tree describes clouds, looming shadows in Israel and Palestine, and their clash over borders. I mark the page.
Looking out the plane window, I’m jarred in a different way by the borderless vastness.
finding a straight edge in a smashed jigsaw
I check my watch, its blank face: The minute hand goes round and round.
A contrail of exhaust the only sign of our passing.
About the Author
Jo Balistreri began her creative life as a pianist and harpsichordist. In 2005, she began writing free-verse poetry after losing her hearing and her ability to play music, and in 2015 registered for a mentoring program through the Haiku Society of America. She has since published widely and in 2019 was included in A New Resonance 12. http://maryjobalistreripoet.com/
Titles have interesting energies whether we want them to fade into the background, set immediate or almost context, or be unraveled / solved within the last few lines of the prose or poem, whichever arrives and leaves first.
Flying Out of Phoenix
We have context, we are in-flight, leaving Arizona (I’ve only been to Arizona by Greyhound).
The title is by default an opening line though the prose opening line is, in my ‘umble opinion as vital if not more so than the title.
“Though we sit side by side, we are alone.”
I can imagine that as an internal monologue or narration in an old B&W movie, or leaving Casablanca to fight the war in Paris, France (not Texas) instead.
Instead we enter the dual nature of a non-fiction novel (yes there is such a thing):
The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2020)
https://www.camera-edu.org/review/the-lemon-tree-an-arab-a-jew-and-the-heart-of-the-middle-east/
We are not in Kansas, but over the USA and yet the Middle East conflict(s) are still as real as ever.
Then we come to our first monostich haiku:
finding a straight edge in a smashed jigsaw
As the lovely single line of prose (not a monostich) makes for a useful editing method, and segue (not juxtaposition) of “I’m bundled and lost in blue fleece.”
Back to the monostich haiku (not monostitch, that’s to do with knitting or sewing ), how do we find a straight edge in a successfully smashed jigsaw, and they are pretty tough!
The final line, and it’s a single line of prose, has more meaning that I first realised.
“A contrail of exhaust the only sign of our passing.”
It’s a physical act of the plane fuel fumes of course, and over a large stretch of land which doesn’t have BORDER stencilled across it, as if it’s a cartoon.
BUT…
In war zones, contrails of fighter and bomber planes were once the only signs of the deadly fatal precision killing weapons of missiles and drones that have long taken over from bombs (dropped weapons that are fully vertical unlike missiles and drones). A kind of successful champion to…
Nazi Germany developed several notable missiles during World War II (1939-1945), including the V-1 and V-2 rockets, as well as guided bombs. The V-2 was the world’s first large-scale liquid-propellant rocket and ballistic missile. The V-1 was a pulsejet-powered cruise missile. These weapons were part of Germany’s “V-weapons” program, intended for strategic bombing and retaliation against Allied targets.
WWII was six years and one day from 1st September 1939 to 2nd September 1945. Although horrors started as early as Spring of 1933. We can add six more years, just as other conflicts never start and end as we believe.
And who are allies nowadays I wonder? Perhaps only individuals reading soon-to-banned books that aid empathy perhaps?
As so many civilian aircraft crash via various means, are good people just contrails?
Do we have blank wristwatches and blank consciences?
blank conscience:
According to a new review, mind blanking is a distinct conscious state in which our minds go ‘nowhere’ because they seem devoid of content. National Post 24 Apr 2025
A haibun worth reading more than once, more than twice…
Alan