Nocturne for a Small Airport
A poem for the last flight out, and the people who wait for it.
A single long poem set entirely inside a regional airport after the last commercial flight has left for the night.
The poem takes place in the hour after the last flight, when the small regional terminal empties out to a handful of cleaning staff, one gate agent, and whoever missed their connection.
It is less about flight than about the specific kind of patience an airport asks of people at its emptiest - a patience with no clear end time, offered to strangers who will likely never see each other again.
I wrote it after actually missing that last flight myself, and spending a night in a terminal I had never intended to know this well.
