WHO WANTS TO FIND AMELIA EARHART?

by Barbara Simmons

Since Amelia Earhart disappeared more than 85 years ago while attempting to fly around the world, people have been searching for her plane with hopes of solving the mystery behind her final flight. Now, an underwater exploration company says they may have found it about 15,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Deep Sea Vision says it captured a sonar image [above] of a plane that matches the dimensions of the Lockheed Electra aircraft Earhart was flying on July 2, 1937. —The Washington Post, January 31, 2024

We love the story, her setting off
to circle the globe, her route 
marked cleanly on the map, 
as is her disappearing point.  
 
We’ve loved the stories since, scenarios
not yielding happy endings, 
but ways to keep Amelia alive, perhaps
as prisoner, spy, or living out a secret life.
 
We’ve climbed with those aboard Itasca, 
signaling hope along with charts,
shedding tears enough to fill the oceans,
not knowing where she lay, nor why.
 
The sonar image we see now, sent from
a depth much deeper than full fathom five,
resembles what she flew, now resting
far below, scant hundred miles from where
 
she’d chosen to refuel.  And if this proves
to be the place her coral bones and pearl eyes rest,
her story has its ending.  We’re left with answers,
not with mystery. We miss the question
 
we maybe wish unanswered, embedded
forever as you’ve been, still flying,
seeking wide and open and free, beyond
a world of narrow, closed, and occupied.

Barbara Simmons, is a Boston-born Californian, a Wellesley College and The Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins) alumna, a retired educator. She savors life with words to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and understand. Publications include Boston Accent, The NewVerse News,  DoubleSpeak, Soul-Lit, Capsule Stories, Journal of  Expressive Writing, and Writing it Real publications.  She was recognized with First Place in the last two annual San Jose Library Spring into Poetry contests, and has published a book of poetry, Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums (Friesen Press), 2022.

LINE OF POSITION

by Peleg Held

Bones discovered on a Pacific island in 1940 are "likely" to be those of famed pilot Amelia Earhart, according to a US peer reviewed science journal. —BBC, March 9, 2018

We are running on a line between
celestial navigation and dead reckoning
tempting the keepers of the crossings:
To live now into the skies.

Gas running low, unable to reach you yet
Electra's song still sings above the static,
the scraping tide where shells are emptied, torn
and wings churn back to ore--
identification in the debris field is a matter of scale.

We must be on you but we cannot see you.
As the sun-line sweeps towards our flight path
we grope for an island. A large ring
of white sand around a bright lagoon.

This is Emil Harte.

We lay out the bones of frigate birds, a testament
on sand. In our dreams Electra remains on the reef
we lean into the transmitter, spit into sunspot
and whisper our coordinates into the harmonic.
Give us a bearing—what is our position now?

I am an island where lost flyers make landfall,
where mercurial fingertips sign the freckled glass
buried in the strand. Here post-loss transmissions
still crackle the air, even as the rest
is carried over in the pincers of crabs.

We are listening.



Author’s Notes: Italicized bits are from the final transmissions of Amelia Earhart. Earhart submitted her poems to Poetry Magazine under the pseudyonym Emil Harte.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

SELF-DRIVING TESLA INVOLVED IN FATAL CRASH

by Don Hogle

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: White on White (Oil on Canvas, 1918) The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange).

“Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.” —TESLA Blog, June 30, 2016

There were no casualties this morning
when Bluetooth failed to connect
an iPod to the Onkyo receiver
that sends the French news
to speakers in my living room.

Nor did the Mac screen shatter
when a pop-up popped up
with the fatal words Cannot
get mail.

In the blue Pacific, rainbow fish
swim in and out of coral
encrusted bone somewhere
near where Amelia dropped
from the sky.

A crew of astronauts burst
once from their capsule like stars
in a meteor shower, glittering
briefly in their yellow-red descents
over Texas and Louisiana.

Madame Curie may have failed
to notice the fatigue in her bones,
but she saw a faint light glowing
from the tubes she carried
in her pockets.

And those at MoMA,
who might have missed
the cool white square tilted
on the warm white background
of a canvas painted by Malevich,
were just bemused by what they saw.

Don Hogle is a poet, blogger and brand and communications strategist living in Manhattan. Poems have appeared recently in Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, Shooter, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable and TheNewVerse.News among others.  He was a finalist in the Northern Colorado Writers’ 2015 Poetry Contest.