BY RANDALL JARRELL
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From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose
From The Complete Poems by Randall Jarrell, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1969, 1996 by Mrs. Randall Jarrell. Used with permission.
“Black Flak and the Nightmare Fighters” is my short play based on Jarrell’s poem, which features the bottom of a B-17 fuselage complete with functional ball turret on stage (the twin .50-caliber machine guns aren’t functional). But it spins with the actor inside “at rise” with the sounds and light-flashes of flak.