Aviator Barbie (work in progress!)

 

When Erica Jong wrote Fear of Flying, 

Grandmother Barbie, then only 14,

took the title literally.  Grandma was

 already a toughie, and determined

not to end up like all those fifties housewives

at least not the ones in commercials who never climbed

      out of their aprons,

who ran off shrieking when little grey mice popped up

 in the kitchen at midnight

-        suddenly forgetting how to pick up a broom  -

or who toted the boys from game to game   but

never dreamt of learning to pitch.  When this Barbie

assured her best friend Ken she was ready to meet

whatever the challenge, his elder brother – he’d flown

fighter planes over Mekong Delta,   crawled home

to live out his days on the streets of Oakland -

said that girls who wanted to fly could serve coffee or tea

on TWA or Panam, land an executive hubby

or at least a half-decent pension plan,  

Grandma got so pissed that  she stomped off

 swearing she’d show those old boys

 - and the new ones too -

never to underestimate a girl who was born

 in 1959.   Not made of plastic, she’d

step down off the shelves after store hours,

 always waiting to first hear the clatter

 when the last employee pulled down the folding  gate,

and switched off the lights.  Steady with a flashlight, 

she’d sit till morning, studying flight manuals and the history 

of aviation, obsessing  over lives like Amelia’s and Bessie’s

or the novel she was currently reading. 

It was about Marx’s bastard daughter

who becomes a pilot, vanishing

into the fogs of a world that reneged on any

real revolution.  There were other stories too

and legends like one about a Mexican lady

who escaped the dungeon by flying

 out the window of her cell.  But my grandma

 Barbie, being no sorceress, concluded

she’d have to fight the system with

its own tools.   When she realized she’d

better not wait for the southern states to ok

the ERA, she decided once again

to take matters into her own hands.

She’d pull on her overalls, sneak

   out onto the airfields

while the others were still stone drunk

 or snoring, flying her planes

to some off-the-map island.  There were

 no h-bombs in hiding, nor tourists

tucked happily away in the brilliant steel belly

 of her dream machine, as she headed out

 into the deep of a night

where no Club Med and no World War III 

could ever be possible.

 

Poem & image:  

©️2022miriamadelman