Leona Sevick
Hull Loss
My brother sits at the table, hands
around a coffee mug, telling me
the worst thing that could happen. Except
he doesn’t mean to the two of us.
He is talking about his work, and
I am listening intently because
he and I do not talk like this. He
calls it “hull loss,” which means the plane is
completely destroyed. It’s pilot speak—
the mother of all euphemisms.
But instead I hear him say “whole” loss,
which seems right in any case. We have
lost them both, our parents, and now I
know this sudden steep descent is
unrecoverable, the breath I’ve
held until my lungs explode is
never returning to its normal
rhythms, the splintering sound of loss
irreversible. You will search in
vain for the small black box that holds my
heart, lost for good in all this wreckage.
Leona Sevick reads “Hull Loss”
Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, The Southern Review, The Sun, and Poetry Northwest. She serves on the boards of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. She is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her second collection of poems, The Bamboo Wife, is published by Trio House Press.