#437A Backstory of the Poem “Flight Number UA50” from the poetry collection ROOMING WITH ELEPHANTS by Julie Weiss; published by Kelsay Books on February 11, 2025.
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“Flight Number UA50” was also published in
Sheila-Na-Gig.
Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? Ever since I was a child, and despite the statistics that confident travelers always talk about, I´ve been terrified of flying. When I returned to poetry in 2018 (BELOWwith wife Olga), I knew it was only a matter of time before I broached my phobia in a poem.
The opportunity presented itself in the spring of 2023, when I started planning a trip home to California, mainly to visit my parents (BELOW), whom, sadly, I hadn´t seen in seven years. I live in Spain, so of course I´d flown before, always reluctantly. Yes, I once caused a huge scene on a very bumpy plane ride—my parents were so embarrassed. When I bought my ticket, the images of plane crashes that I´d witnessed on the news or read about in magazines or newspapers throughout my life assaulted me on a daily basis. I´d work myself up into such a frenzy at night that I frequently cried myself to sleep, imagining myself bracing for impact as my plane nosedived, or spun out of control, crashed into the Atlantic. Mostly, I despaired at death ripping me away from my family, especially my young children, at being robbed of the joy of accompanying them on their journey from childhood to adulthood. My mind was trapped in a turbulence of disturbing images for months, until I finally sat down to work them into a poem.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. My writing area hasn´t changed since 2018, when I returned to poetry after a 17-year unintentional hiatus. I write in my fuchsia and grey bedroom, which doubles as an office. Most Spanish apartments are small, so everything has to double as everything else. By day, I work as an online business English teacher. By night, I write poems directly on my computer, at my desk, which is white, narrow, and attached to the wall. If I roll my chair backwards a few centimeters, I hit the side of my bed. There´s a large calendar hanging above my computer, because if I don´t jot down important dates, they go in one eye and out the other—no virtual agendas for me! There are other wall decorations, too: three small ornamental mirrors, also fuchsia, placed catty-corner from each other, my children´s notes and drawings, some cute animal stickers, and above one of the mirrors, an adorable picture of my daughter when she was two and a half years old, holding her newborn brother on her chest. On the wall to my right, there are three differently-sized square shelves, staggered for artistic effect, which hold objects such as perfume bottles, candles, jewelry boxes. The shelf on the bottom is dedicated to my children’s fusion bead crafts. To the right of the shelves, hung on a part of the wall that juts out like a pillar, there’s a framed copy of my poem “On Our Wedding” (published in Sinister Wisdom https://www.sinisterwisdom.org/), the English version alongside the Spanish translation, which I wrote for my wife and read at our ceremony in 2013.
Hanging from one corner of the frame is a black bear necklace, which belonged to my beloved late university professor, Virginia de Araujo. When I’m writing, I often look at her necklace, imagine her sitting next to me, giving me her sage advice, or a bear hug.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I started physically writing the poem in September 2023 (BELOW), after I´d safely returned home to Spain from California. In retrospect, I must have started writing it mentally the minute the customer service agent asked me if I was travelling alone. I´ll never forget her expression, tinged with condolences or mourning, as if she knew she was about to send me to my death, though she was probably just sleepy.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I´m afraid that´s a really difficult question for me. I don´t write different drafts of my poems. I simply keep changing them line by line, editing as I go along, until I´m satisfied with the result. I´m sure the poem I started out with and the poem I ended up with are quite different, as I tend to be very picky when it comes to phrasing, word choice, and line breaks, but I can´t remember any particular changes now.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? This poem is as much about my oftentimes debilitating fear of death as it is about my fear of flying. I know there are many people out there who share these phobias, and I hope that after they read this poem, they walk away feeling a little less alone. That´s one of the things that draws people to poetry, isn´t it? The sense of humanity, of being together in this thing called life, no matter who we are or where we come from. Poetry allows the reader to relate, identify, empathize. If this poem, or any poem I write, ends up becoming the shoulder someone else cries on, then I´ve succeeded in my task.
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Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Definitely this line: “What if I can´t / memorize every millisecond / of their faces before boarding?” Although the poem is about taking a flight—which may or may not crash— without my family, I think the above line evokes every parent´s fear of losing their child, or their child losing them, and it also raises the subsequent, albeit illogical, question: how is it possible for time to continue along its normal trajectory after such a loss? These lines are also emotionally significant to me: “A woman I once knew / convinced her friend that statistics / were in his favor. I´ve spent two / decades failing to forget the rest.” (BELOW: Julie in February 2025. Facebook Logo Phot0)
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When I moved to Spain in 2001, I became good friends with a woman who told me a chilling anecdote. She´d once had a good friend who was afraid of flying, and who had never taken a plane. When she was living in another city, she finally convinced him to visit her, insisting on the usual statistics. Tragically, the one plane he ever took crashed. None of us are invincible against death, nor do we know when we´re going to hear the knock, on a plane or elsewhere, and though mortality tails us like a contrail from the moment we´re born, it´s a reality so many of us are hard-pressed to accept.
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