Between my thumb and forefinger, I am holding the small, stubborn seed of a city’s wings.

This duralumin rivet is cold to the touch, a leftover scrap from a red-barn factory where men once stitched spruce and fabric into the shapes of clouds. In this blue Seattle evening, the scent of Lake Union’s brackish water drifts through my studio window, mingling with the dry, metallic ghost of machine oil that still clings to my desk. We were a town of timber and salmon once, satisfied with the mud, until the sudden, screeching ambition of the jet age hammered us into something harder and faster. I look at this tiny bit of hardware and see the thousand rivets that followed, holding together the pressurized dreams of a thousand restless travelers.
The cedar yields to the titanium spire,
Where salt-spray meets the engine’s fire.
A silver scar across the Sound,
Proves man was never meant for ground.