Lufthansa 747
Mid-flight the film dies,
black-white Chaplin flicker.
City Lights drowns in static.
Earphones search other channels.
Jazz Konzert. Promise of release.
Nervous eyes face the dark Atlantic,
Surly and massive, before
retreating to torn magazines.
Refugees
Amtrak-stalled in Kansas October
they wait for buses,
scanning anxious horizons
in Foster Grants.
Muzak dying,
they drink warm beer
conspiring complaints.
Mid-America, they are
missing planes, missing appointments.
Digital Seikos flash numbers,
precise reminders of
lost sales, lost time.
Beyond their windows
yellow leaves
brush the restless earth
of lonely cowboy dreams.
White Nights
Leningrad find me alone
without God or a girl.
I sit with Finnish sailors
and German salesmen. Rubles, shunned,
dollars, pounds, marks
flow across the hotel bar.
Alone and afraid
I avoid my room
cushioned in silence
and move to the windows.
On the Neva
the Aurora steams,
locked in ice.
Below, windswept streets
where ragged boys pester
tourists for chewing gum.
Mark Connelly‘s poetry has been published in several anthologies and journals, including Bitterroot, The San Fernando Poetry Journal, Green’s Magazine, and Milwaukee Road Review. His fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, The Ledge, Change Seven, 34th Parallel, Mobius Blvd., and Digital Papercut. In 2005 Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes.
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