Going Solo

A friend announces she’s now a pilot—
high flung, jack-hammered into the crust

of a postcard sky. She flies from a hanger
near where I once found an old lady padding,

lost from even Herself. Thank you. Thank you,
they said when I snagged the waif and sewed

her with yarn back onto her family like a paper
doll dress onto one of those cards my mother used

to teach me stitches. Her brow never raised,
not once, during her skyward diversion. She

had tapped, with hope, into all those pilots.









Grace Curtis’ book, The Shape of a Box, is available from Dos Madres Press. The Surly Bonds of Earth was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage chapbook contest. Prose and poetry in such journals as The Chaffin Journal, Sou’wester, The Baltimore Review, Waccamaw Literary Journal, and others. She works for The Antioch Review. www.gracecurtispoetry.com