Stephan Delbos
DISTANCE & DESTINATION
In a plane,
I am the plane
to observers
on earth.
In air I am not
the air,
though I am
there, massive
pressure of
pretending
to be capable
of flight.
On the eulogy
altar
I will no longer
be the audience.
Speaking,
my words wind
vibrating hairs
in listeners’ ears.
Ruins I have
roared
through holes.
Stephan Delbos is the author of the poetry chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2016); and the poetry collections Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2019); Small Talk (Dos Madres, 2021); and Two Poems (The Literary Salon, 2021). His translations from Czech include Vítězslav Nezval’s The Absolute Gravedigger (Twisted Spoon, 2016) and Woman in the Plural (Twisted Spoon, 2021); and Paris Notebook by poet Tereza Riedlbauchová (Verse Chorus Press, 2020). His scholarly study, The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism, was published by Palgrave in 2021. He is a founding editor of B O D Y (www.bodyliterature.com). From 2020 to 2024 he served as the first Poet Laureate of Plymouth, Massachusetts.