Up In the Air, by Sean Kelbley

A 2017 Best of the Net nominee, Sean Kelbley lives on a farm in
southeastern Ohio with his husband, in a house they built themselves.
He works as an elementary school counselor. Recent poems are at Poets
Reading the News, Rise Up Review, and Tuck Magazine.


About the poem:
This, in its way, is a love poem to everyone who’s affected by the ongoing attempts
to “fix” healthcare in America, and specifically to those I love in my home,
Appalachia. It’s also a pretty accurate pastiche of surrealistic nightmares I’ve
been having since this past summer. There’s a little bit of regional fatalism to
it, perhaps. And I suppose it could be read as “uppity,” but that’s not the intent.