Black Box
by Louise McKenna


For a month we’ve been searching
for what the ocean might yield:

pieces of a jet’s spine or tailbone,
parts of the wings, floating suitcases,

a box of flight data and words from the pilot
like memories trapped inside the pillowed head

of a patient insensate upon a bed.
When pulses of infrasound are picked up

we reach out, as if we are probing for the hand
of comatose kin wired to a monitor,

willing them to rise up from the darkness
inside the skull, and speak.






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