On my sixteenth birthday,
my uncle gave me a balsa wood airplane,
or rather, the wood
that comes together to make one.

While I started out strong,
assembling most of the fuselage,
it would go unfinished
and stay a skeleton.

Most of its life
collected cobwebs.
My uncle drinks whiskey
in the pool at night.

I think of the airframe
still waiting to be put together,
waiting to fly
to the other side of this.