poem

by AJ Wright

We build an airplane

haul a scabby go-kart frame up the bank and over

the tracks—rotten welding, a wobbly bolt; somebody’s half-done Scouts project kicked over the hill. Not even angry enough to hit the water. We’d have stuck around for the splash. We scrub

it clean, pick at the flecked paint with

schoolyard-dirty fingernails, drag lumber from a flatbed stack in the dark. They’ll never count it missing; they never keep track of anything—not the midday buzz of the saw in the abandoned garage, not the shabby clump of us crouched around the mess, ramming wing-plank where wing-plank fits. We case the road for tractors, tractor tires, the bald rubber they’ll miss the least. We don’t see who comes lurching through the tall grass with a barn fan until they’re alight in the wedge of flashlight beam, bare-handed and passing it by its rustiest blade—a tetanoid communion, a greasy key to the widening sky.

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AJ Wright is a poet from Appalachia whose work appears or is forthcoming in SWING, APARTMENT Poetry, Hole in the Head Review, Antiphony Journal, The Garlic Press, and elsewhere. She runs Pictura Journal, and her first collection will be published by Pulley Press in 2026. She currently resides in West Virginia.