Stella Lei

A Gate Agent Prepares to Make a Boarding Announcement

In the airport terminal there is a clock—
numbers an inky circlet around white. In the airport

terminal there is a clock and its arms tick
forward, each step a subtraction,

each subtraction a ghost. The terminal
is filling, overspilling, and I watch the face

of the clock, count the ticks-steps-ghosts,
watch the faces of the passengers

as they shuffle and swarm. I read
that 176,000 commercial flights take off

a day which means two commercial flights
a second which means three to four hundred people

a second, launching into the sky,
leaving behind the ghosts of people

who cooked and swept and sent the children
to school, red-eyed nights blurring into too-short days,

shedding shadows like skins and stepping
into deafening blue. Or maybe they are heading

home, unfastening sunlight like loaned jewels,
pearled seconds losing themselves to dirt.

Touching down and rebuttoning their molt—
wrinkled, a size too small.

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Stella Lei's work is published or forthcoming in Honey Literary, Milk Candy Review, Okay Donkey and elsewhere. She is an Editor in Chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04. You can find more of her work at stellaleiwrites.weebly.com.