Flight 1234 Has Been Cancelled

Jk Mansi
Jk Mansi
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

While My Body Sings the Songs. Flight Series #7

Flight 1234: My body sings the songs. Text by JkM. !Reclamation Song! Poetry by Jhilmil Breckenridge, Book cover by Red River Press

Crunching chips loudly
I am annoying the man
in the next seat, sipping
on his gin and tonic at
11 in the morning over the
brown stretches of desert
below us.

My body talks

Insulin dependent,
my body struggles to control
the shaking of foodlessness
waiting for cancelled flights
to resume, rebook, resigned.

My body, diuretic dependent,
to keep my heart beating, wet
pads I wear to catch the urine
of post menopausal bladders
soaking through my capris.

Dabbing at my eyes reading
the lived pain of my sister
in trauma, !Reclamation Song!*
Cover red with the blood taken
From her, blood that she has shed

The combined pain of all Women
sons all lost, babies left unborn.

Crunching chips loudly
to drown out the sound
of my silent sobs, not
really heard over the sound
of the engines under us

He looks at me annoyed
for disturbing his WS Journal
his gin and tonic, and his
Unacknowledged White Male
Privilege as I smile metta

at him, not knowing which
one of us is wrong.

My body sings the song

My scars, invisible behind
sensible clothes, not showing.
my age not apparent, hair
not fully silver, uncolored.
skin not wrinkled, brown don’t frown.

How could he possibly know
I’m older than his mother, sitting
here crunching my chips loudly
crying into my cooling tea while
his gin and tonic get warmer
with the shedding of my tears

My body listens

Between the moments the words stream through my mind and I take the phone out to type on a too small keyboard, my notebook confiscated by the TSA written in the Hindi alphabet smelling of the CBD that’s keeping me anchored to the present in the turbulence of changing flights and airports and time zones, the words streak out of my slow fingers and my too fast mind.

But my body remembers.

Now so does my predictive text.
Automatically offering up “remembers”
each time I type the word body.

*Title of the book of poetry pictured above by Jhilmil Breckenridge

©JkMansi Juhi Kalra 2018. All rights reserved.

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