Dear FAA

This possibility really never
occurred to me. I knew it

could happen, but I assumed
I would be at home.

I pictured my own comforter,
my own ringed tub. Certainly I

thought I could stretch out. The woman
on the plane beside me works for you.

She's a wildlife biologist and she
takes away all the food birds might like

around airports so your flocks don't
encounter their flocks. She grew up

in Brussels but met an American professor
on sabbatical. She's asleep now, her blond

dreadlock-beads clicking against the window.
She already told me she is glad she didn't

have children because it makes her transfer
from Denver to Miami much easier. I guess

I don't look pregnant to her and in a few hours
I won't be. Was this your way of preparing me?

---

HANNAH STAR ROGERS received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD on the intersection of art and science from Cornell University. She teaches writing at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly,  and The Brazenhead Review. Her flash fiction has been honored by Nat. Brut and Glimmer Train. She has received the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in Stuttgart, Germany; Djerassi Artist Residency in Woodside, California; the international artist residency at ArtHub in Kingman, Arizona; the Arctic Circle in Finland; and National Park Service writing residencies in both Acadia, Maine and the Everglades, Florida. hannahstarrogers.com