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# Periphery
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/periphery/
- Published: 2024-06-09T18:39:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-15T05:02:50.000Z
- Description: Somewhere over Tulsa the pilot warns we’re passing through a storm. Experienced in flight, trusting the engineers who designed and built this plane, we pop headphones back in our ears, turn to our movies and TV...
- Author: Andy
- Tags: poetry, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

Somewhere over Tulsa the pilot warns  
we’re passing through a storm. Experienced  
in flight, trusting the engineers who designed  
and built this plane, we pop headphones back  
in our ears, turn to our movies and TV even  
as, out of habit or suppressed nerves, we  
pull our seatbelts a little tighter, recalling,  
perhaps, that story about that flight—was it  
London to Singapore? So much of what transpires  
on this populous, complicated world, reaches us  
but briefly, like the wan light from a first-quarter  
moon—where a passenger died. I am lost in some  
forgettable show about a murder and a hardened detective  
doing all he can to solve it, when my head is jostled  
such that, out of the corner of my eye, I notice  
flashes of brightness, each a nuclear blast rippling  
through a miles-long arterial vein, eviscerate the perfect  
darkness. I have never seen such color, a dozen bolts  
of lightning, blueish-white and hotter than the sun, each  
coming to life and dying in an instant, over and over  
and over. I think of near-death experiences, how people  
report seeing heaven, how fMRI has shown that  
this is but a brain shutting down, how there are nearly  
two hundred of us here, warm blood in our veins,  
roughly alike in our need for love and wonder and the  
prolongation of life, heads down, passing so close to  
the great unknown, it could blind us in its glory.