☀ Today's Poem: "Action Origami" Andrea Cohen

How much can you do
with one piece of paper—
creasing, tearing, adding
volume with air? You can
make a mythic sea
monster toppling a tall
ship in high, high seas, as
my seatmate in 30C did
in sixteen hours. He was
from Saipan, an island
advertised as a pearl
arrived at by sea or air. This
should have been a six-
hour trip from Boston
to San Francisco, but mostly
we sat on the tarmac, iced
in, waiting, as I did in a similar
but different blizzard in ’83,
on a People's Express flight
from Logan to JFK. I was going
to Park Ave to see a specialist in
what I had. We called it homosexuality
then, or my parents did, and my father
was convinced it was his fault, on
account of his queer cousin in Augusta,
and his schizophrenic brother. I was
going to the specialist for them, was
going to die in the plane crash
for them, and wouldn’t they
feel like hell? Well, I didn’t
die then, but learned to call
all we didn’t comprehend
gaps in understanding, becoming
as those with fortune do, more
of who I was. No one is more
than one sheet thrown to the wind,
folded and refolded, becoming what
the person beside her might never
believe possible. The man from Saipan
has a window seat, he has clouds
and a stack of boarding passes
fastened with a rubber band, like
an out-sized deck of playing cards,
evidence of all the flights he’s taken
this year. It’s the end of December.
Flights are different from places.
Places are different from people.
In half a million miles, he’s seen
mostly the inside of planes
and terminals. He says, I like
being in the air, without saying
what happened on the ground, but
it must have been something, don’t
you think, something makes a man
crave to be in transit, to swill
chocolate milk and vodka from a paper
cup, to count passage in hundreds
of thousands of miles, to squeeze
himself into a metal tube the way
my grandparents, tumbling into
each other at the department store
where they worked, in Pittsburgh, in
1926, tucked love letters into pneumatic
tubes from ladies’ hats to men’s attire.
People ought to be love
letters, we ought to get sent
at Mach speeds to someone who,
tenderly, will tear us open, will
reread us constantly and continuously,
and the man from Saipan hands me
the sea and the ship and the sea
monster ready to make everything
veer off course, and I ask him
to sign it, and he does, with
xx, the way a man who can’t
write does, or like one
signaling, via shorthand—
with love.