Poet Joshua Clover and 11 Students May Face Prison Time

the hindenburg
by rachel forbes

I’ll whisper my love into a balloon and let it go at the top of the hill so it will find you wherever you are, he tells me. I take a moment, his lips to my shoulder, his hands clasped over my ribs, to imagine this. The balloon is red, his whispering lips are pink, and the sky is gray. Gray and cold. I breathe out without making a sound, realize this is the time a girl should respond favorably, and exhale again, sounding satisfied. Now I am out of breath.

Although (he is not finished) I would need an entire zeppelin for all of my love, a regular balloon could not hold it. I’d need the Hindenburg.

Didn’t the Hindenburg end in disaster?

Disaster. It would be a massive ball of burning love, he tells me, impacting everyone around it. That’s no disaster.

I picture the gray footage of the aimless blimp. I see men in uniforms running from my hydrogen ignited love. Flame eaten flesh and singed eyelashes. One of the worst catastrophes in the world, the newscaster is crying, and the entire structure burnt to infinity in mere seconds. Burning wreckage. When his breathing has steadied I rise and dress. I write with my blue eyeliner in the lower corner of his bathroom mirror; ‘oh, the humanity’. I step into the thick wet night and lock his door behind me, leaving his key in his mailbox I listen to my stilettos echo on the leaf littered cement, each step louder than the last.