Blue Angel Jets Oversee a Florida Pool Party
art by Andrew Velazquez
by Courtney Hitson
The Fort Lauderdale Air Show’s slated to start in 13 minutes. A mom, almost not-frowning, poses sculptures of fruit: her striated shell of a hollowed watermelon becomes a shark’s gaping maw stuffed with grapes. A pineapple turns to an owl, complete with cross-sectioned, orange-slices of eyes and leaves divvied into flanks. Teenagers selfie their faces into whimsical pouts, as if yard gnomes flirting with sentience. Adorable and invasive parakeets spectate the scene from a perimeter of unlit tiki torches. They are gossipy rascals, still privy to the comradery—green and chirping—of social animals.
Above, these winged, steel behemoths, twelve tons each, flaunt garish, obscenely industrial appendages and rip a sound from the sky, sharp enough to halve the afternoon. They abide their pilots’ choreography not unlike the pilots’ own loyalty to their anthem, as if marionettes turned puppeteers. Everybody looks up; not at the planes, but at phones that face the planes. This cacophony—flight screeches speeding to crescendos—the only mammalian call we term pollutant.
“It feels like a bath,” a girl in the water whines to no one, as she fingers the spout of another’s inflatable unicorn. Her parents blend into the glaze-eyed, beastly crowd. The parakeets acknowledge this spectacle like a sated belly at a bland snack. They know that the problem—delightfully tautological—has already solved itself.
See, nature has nabbed that same freakish hubris behind man’s destruction and repurposed it for herself. It’s now a self-annihilating ingenuity: Creations of trojan-horses into cars and aircraft, factories of assembly, even bisected atoms. We built and enacted all of them, en masse, each of us carrying a dose of our own antidote.
Courtney Hitson teaches creative writing and literature at Georgia College & State University. She’s been published in a variety of journals including Potomac Review, Pinch, Wisconsin Review, Tulsa Review, Eastern Iowa Review, and Hawaii Pacific Review among others. Courtney’s poetry has received five Pushcart nominations. Outside of writing, she enjoys scuba-diving, unicycling, Visual Culture, and philosophy.
https://cehitson.wixsite.com/cehitson
Andrew Velazquez is a photographer and lawyer/civil rights investigator from the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. For more than 25 years, he has explored the world through a camera, finding inspiration in wildlife, natural landscapes, urban environments, and travel. He enjoys hiking in search of wildlife and exploring new places with his wife, using photography as a way to slow down and reconnect with the natural world. Through his images, Andrew hopes to inspire others to pause, look a little closer, and appreciate the beauty that often goes unnoticed. His work can be found at akvphoto.com and on Instagram at @akv_photo.
