Ink & Ribbon Press publishes my poem “Revolutionary Airport.”
Idlewild, 8/29/26
My poem “Revolutionary Airport” was shortlisted for Ink & Ribbon Press’ LemonLight Prize.
Ink & Ribbon is a new, independent press based in Bainbridge Island, Washington dedicated to publishing elegant editions of new poetry.
Earlier this month they published their sixth release, a collection to mark the LemonLight prize; the handsome volume includes the winning poem, four honorable mentions, and all the shortlisted poems—50 of them out of “3,500 poems submitted across eight countries.”
To celebrate this news, I stayed home last Friday night to record an Instagram reel starring me reading the poem.
“Revolutionary Airport” was prompted by American historian Martha Hodes’ 2023 memoir, My Hijacking—her account of being on board a hijacked plane in September 1970 when she was 12 years old. The memoir is as much a reflection on recovering buried memory as it is a story of the hijacking, a major news event that year that foreshadowed the spree of guerrilla hijackings in the early and mid-1970s.
My poem starts there, but itself is more fascinated with the phrase “Revolutionary Airport,” a perfect dose of 1970s rhetoric used by the hijackers.
Stuck on the phrase, and wishing I was Martha, I chased the words “Revolutionary Airport” to indulge my passion for space-age architecture and its superstar practitioner, early-1960s Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. I found joy in celebrating his humanism versus the nativist soul of violence.
Here’s the poem:
Revolutionary Airport
When the hijackers said: To the Revolutionary Airport!
she misunderstood. A mondegreen of mind not mouth,
a predicament of youth; Martha had just turned 12 in June.
Plus they had guns. She had her spiral sketch book.
When the hijackers flashed steel-plated .38s,
an old lady in the aisle seat clutched her heart and moaned,
My pills my pills! Martha’s older sister, in the middle,
rummaged through the woman’s handbag.
Martha couldn’t comprehend
the customized jargon of blinkered myth,
where revolution means bible-story hailstorms
instead of redistribution of wealth.
The idea of a revolutionary airport made Martha think of Pegasus.
She pictured her favorite horse aloft among space stations.
In her book she drew storyboards of the jet age.
Its invisible walkways and green lights.
Saarinen’s curves of flights and tulips.
Instead of diverting the plane to the desert floor,
she dreamed from her window seat
the hijackers would return them to Athens International
where like her smudgy searchlights on pastel paper
human architecture would besmirch the sky with wonder.