Kathryn Kimball

On the Airplaine

In front of me
in the gap between the seats
I saw a woman whose head
rested on a man's suit jacket.

I saw the woman's head turn
now in profile
with a large tear
coursing down her cheek.

I saw the man
adjust his seat,
pull out a white handkerchief
and dab a now contorted face.

I wondered, engrossed
in the drama that I knew
happens in the cracks,
what sadness had caused the tear

and if that hand
with its spotless linen
could help beyond
the present sorrow.

---

Kathryn Kimball grew up in the South, attended college in the West, and raised a family in the Northeast. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and an MFA in Poetry. For many years, she taught nineteenth-century British literature. Her work has appeared in Transference, Plume, The Galway Review, and elsewhere. Finishing Line Press published Crossings, a chapbook of poems, in 2021. A practitioner of yoga for twenty-five years, she lives with her husband in New York City.