by Fran Davis
Representative image created using AI via India Today
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Cuong Tran is the man whose iPhone fell out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 when the plane lost a door plug during the flight, which was going from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, on January 5. His phone was recovered on the side of a road and miraculously survived the drop of thousands of feet: It still had half of its battery's charge and was in airplane mode, opened to an email containing a baggage claim receipt. —Business Insider, January 13, 2024
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A fierce gust ripped out like a rude birth to incomprehensible air propellered by wind strong steel case glinting sun blue sky dark earth turning and turning the hawk’s gyre compass berserk with spinning electrons scattered hectic static stilled freefall calm at the farthest edges deep silence of time unscaled violent jolt jiggering compass shuddering apps readjustments where is where is the tower glass face swept clean thumbs probing questions that can’t be answered
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Fran Davis is a journalist living on California’s South Coast. Her writing appears in magazines and travel books. Her prose and poems have been published in New Verse News, Calyx, The Chattahoochee Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Reed Magazine, Passager, and several anthologies. She is a winner of the Lamar York prize York prize for nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
omg the iPhone has replaced the TIMEX watch that just goes on ticking after a freefall ... kudos to the poet who found this detail and turned it into this ...
Brilliant Fran, as always! Tempting subject to write about, you aced it.