Static Line
Cody Gallo
My lungs slip out of my / ribcage to flutter / like broken wings
Eviscerated, you pulled the ripcord
on my guts.
The static lines flap
against the gray hull of the C-17 Globemaster
as you soar up up up
into the heavens
while I tumble down through the
Saharan sunrise.
Trailing behind me
My colon, intestines and stomach
twist, attached by my esophagus
in place of the T-10 Delta parachute.
My lungs slip out of my
ribcage to flutter
like broken wings.
I impact the burning sand.
I stare up at
300 OD green jellyfish
floating down
through golden mist.
What was the goal again?
I drag myself into the meager shade
of a bone dry bush.
On its branches, I observe
a constellation of white orbs,
shells, delicate as my fingernails,
housing desert snails
that slug along the branches.
What is the goal?
A soothsayer told a child
he’d lived through lifetimes
of bloodshed
and sent him on a fool’s errand
Chasing after a grail,
on an odyssey to Ithaca,
deployed him
on what should have been a UN mission
What was the goal?
After twenty years
We are still half a world apart
You are the ocean
and I lay
in an ancient sea bed
tracing eons in the layers
Your heart beats
as fast as the hummingbird
drinking from the bougainvillea
that I spent years nursing from a weed
My mind is lost
in the galaxy of
its own neurons
firing erratically
Your impatience is a virtue
until it pulls the ripcord
and you flit away,
little hummingbird
And leave me
to collect what’s left
just enough dust to pour
into the shell of a desiccated snail
What was the goal?
✽ ✽ ✽
Cody Gallo was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He served in the US Army, 82nd Airborne Division, as an Airborne Infantry Officer, from 2006 to 2010. He deployed to Iraq in 2007 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and to Haiti in 2010 in support of Operation Unified Response. He then served in the Army National Guard as a Public Affairs Officer, from 2010 to 2016. He now works in the film & television industry and lives with his wife and daughter in Bergen, Norway. His poetry has been published in The Deadly Writers Patrol.