We are landing in the night and the lights make our town a city the way one light in the dark seems like home, seems safe. The babies were brown & cried loud in the native tongue of babies, not the Sinhalese, or Bengali I imagined their father used when he said what no doubt meant be quiet little one or shut the fuck up (and who among us would know, though many of us were thinking it). I prefer the former. Then baby said to all of us I have to pee pee. I have to pee pee, and we wanted to say Jesus, fuck man, let the damn kid pee, but we were landing and none of us could move and I imagined a river of pee moving under my seat, soaking my computer bag, gliding toward the pilot’s locked door. Threat code yellow, threat code warm. I raised my feet and then the baby was quiet and his father too.

RICK CAMPBELL’s newest book of poems is Dixmont, from Autumn House Press. His other books are The Traveler’s Companion (Black Bay Books, 2004); and Setting The World In Order (Texas Tech 2001) which won the Walt McDonald Prize and A Day’s Work (State Street Press 2000);. He’s won a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. He’s published poems and essays in many journals including The Georgia Review, The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner and many others. He is the director of Anhinga Press and the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and he teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida. He was born on the Ohio River 20 miles downriver from Pittsburgh and lives with his wife and daughter in Gadsden County, Florida.