The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

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Panic Attack on an Airplane, With My Daughter

I start to pray but then I remember
there is no God. Philadelphia stutters
below us all in our bullet,
seatbelted, flying
inside of a cumulus hell,
hot and endless around me,
autonomic and nervous,
losing sensation, fingers taloned
around the armrest,
riding the current up and tensing
for the fall,
for the scream and the shudder
of welding, of metal kicked
through the air like a can,
like a bean, my baby,
the body I grew from a seed
strapped into this contraption,
rising and falling with me,
the mother, the maker
of this and all decisions,
wild-eyed and clawing around
for the barf bag, breathing,
the bag like a heart
pumping carbon dioxide
into my brain, getting lighter
and rising up through the holes
in my scalp and my skin,
floating over my daughter,
the vagus outline of her
in the middle seat,
next to a stranger,
tied to this thing
with its wings and fabric,
coffee and sweat suspended
in air with me, my body
below in the chair, sitting
rigid and pointless
next to my daughter,
praying to pass out,
brainless,
a primitive animal begging
to leave her young.

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