Watching Planes Take Off in Late Evening While High on Shrooms

The sky an electric blue being pulled
into a blackness I’m too scared to
look into directly with these pupils
pried wide like busted elevator doors.
My brother tries to guide me but my
phone grows too bright to read his
messages, a glowing on the cusp of
explosion. Instead, I watch the planes,
their many lights coalescing a smudged
green so they resemble long caterpillars
crawling up the blued façade of the sky,
grown tired of waiting for wings.

Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he completed his MFA at FIU in Miami. His poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.