Creative Nonfiction: Flight Wisdom After the Third Gin & Tonic

By Sav Franz

The Peace River snakes up through the center of the Florida mega-peninsula, twisting lazily in some miles-long stretches, warbling back on itself in tight razorbacks in others. There’s no straight lines in nature, most certainly so in the swamp. That’s what my Papa always told me— 

 

“Watch out for straight edges, those perfect strokes in the earth. They’re man’s dirty trick on himself, mhm.”

 

Up high like this, sailing on iron & human arrogance, I won’t be made the fool like we are down in the mud. From where I’m seated, it all looks like a shit-stomped shoelace, or some fattened-up tapeworm gestating in the asshole & lower intestine of some oblivious bovine host. 

 

Floating above the margins, where no white-picket fences could nip my rusty ankles. 

 

Being up tall can make you feel mighty wise, perched amongst the clouds you could almost guess yourself God, peering around cirrus to catch glimpses of wings, & wheels, & endless eyes watching you right back. Kicking your feet while ogling at all the little ones down below scampering across blasphemous asphalt borders, gnashing teeth over the fetid scraps. Heavy eyes considering heaven, feet sinking in the muck. I suppose we’re silly like that at all altitudes. 

 

But there’s nothing wrong with dreaming, or gin,

 

my Papa preached that too.

Sav Franz is a loosely strung banjo living in Winston-Salem, NC. Their work has appeared in Tiny Seed, Poetic Sexploration, Let’s Stab Caesar!, andShort Ends.