“Gate A-4” has been published both as a short story and a prose poem. The prose poem version contains enjambment, which means that some sentences continue over the line break and on to the next line without a pause, giving the prose sentences a “poetic” quality. In “Gate A4,” other poetic qualities are observable in the speaker’s deliberate use of everyday diction and idiomatic speech. Striking visual imagery and evocative symbols are also present in the poem, offering the reader opportunities to imagine the airport scene for themselves and to feel the mood of the poem according to the reader’s own associations with the images and symbols at play.

The action of the poem is spare and immediate, contained within the setting of an airport terminal: A vulnerable woman misunderstands something important, then understands, thanks to the kindness of a stranger. The shifts in the mood of the poem, from ominous to optimistic, are more complex than the actual events of the poem, which suggests that the speaker believes that the internal, emotional lives of the individuals involved are more important than their external actions.