Flying into Dallas

By Jayne Marek

For a long time, I slid smoothly in clear

space above cloud cover

with its golden smile. Then rolls of pink

hair sifted up and flowed

across the window, and a shoulder

of dark land appeared

tipped with toy shapes of a city beginning

to shimmer in dusk,

while the dense scarlet sun

leaned over it, too heavy

to hold itself up, exhaling sweet violet

as its nightcap slowly 

slid down to cover its eye.

Jayne Marek’s poetry collections are Company of Women: New and Selected Poems (co-authored with Lylanne Musselman and Mary Sexson, 2013), Imposition of Form on the Natural World (2013), and In and Out of Rough Water (2017), with a new full-length book scheduled to appear late in 2017.  Her poems and art photos appear in publications such as Spillway, Amsterdam Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Amsterdam Review, Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, Notre Dame Review, 3Elements, Watershed Review, Sliver of Stone, Camas, and elsewhere.