What I Thought About at an Oyster Bar During Happy Hour by John C. Mannone

It was low IFR—400 and 2—at Martha’s Vineyard,
worsening throughout the day. Some commercial
flights—turboprops—were missing the approaches.

After I landed in my Piper Archer II, a small plane
in comparison, the controller said I was the first
to get in so far. High winds must have blown others

off the approach course. It’s often tricky to fly
off the Massachusetts coast at night, haze obscuring
horizon, even with the moon floating at the edge

of deep water, scraping oyster beds. I flew over
Kennedy’s home a month before John F junior left
the Jersey coast on a night flight across the Sound.

He didn’t make it. They said his inexperienced plane
fell at 2700 feet per minute. Spatial Disorientation.
I take big swig of a New England style IPA, hazy, slam

the mug on the bar, causing the coins to fly off the edge
followed by the tinny sound of change smacking the floor.
An unhappy hour—my oysters had lost their shimmer,
their briny-kelp flavor.

John C. Mannone has work in Adanna Literary Journal, Anacua Literary Arts Journal, and Number One, and in Artemis, Poetry South, Human/Kind Journal, Red Coyote, Blue Fifth Review, New England Journal of Medicine, Baltimore Review, and others. He won a Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian literature (2017) and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He’s a retired professor of physics living between Knoxville and Chattanooga, TN. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com