1A

Image credit: Partial screenshot of a roundtrip flight from JFK Airport (NY) to Portland International (WA). Renee Johnston for Public Square Amplified

There is no comfort at thirty thousand feet on a teacher's salary.

The rows are segregated like the country:

according to race -- which is also socio economic status

I look like seat 1A wearing my

$10 jeans and a had- to- have-this sweater.

All of the rich people in my front row seats 

smile at me when I stroll pass.

The middle class people in the middle add a wave to their smile like we are family 

even though my people are shot for being black like the guy in the news today whose name we will certainly forget even though he was shot at work-- a security guard-- by the police after he had done the tremendous job of stopping the gun wielding bad guy in the club

He wanted to be a cop, the news article said

He is dead because he is black, I read.

I'm sitting in his seat in the back: 36A

When the white people,

who could be less wealthy than me, 

Walk from the middle or the front to use the bathroom or exercise or see the flight attendant 

They say to me, “I love how you wrap your hair.”

I say, “thank you,”

because it doesn’t matter that my eyes were closed

when they happened by. 

It doesn't matter that I was dreaming 

because I am black in the back of the racially and socioeconomically segregated plane pretending to be my ancestors even though my seat, my real seat, is 1A 

The people in my seat, all over this country, are holding on to my seat with desperate claws

They are smiling and waving and

shooting us to death

Nobody says, “sorry for your loss”

Nobody on the racially and social economically divided plane is discussing bullet lynchings.

The plane talk today is about wedding dresses, grandbabies and business meetings

One lady who has the same ancestry as me, sits between two friendly white men. She is smiling at them with plastic cheekbones, but her plastic melts when she sees me. Her eyes cut my lips and I don't say anything to her at all, 

anyway who can say gentle nothings about braids and hairwraps when men are lying 

on the asphalt with our ancestry pouring out?

Okay. Not today. 

Today, I grade papers and mourn in silence in route to my Seattle suburb second home 

I will admire the art collection on the walls,

peak out at the garden and maybe plant a bulb 

for what's-his- name 

who was bullet lynched today