James Wells
Emily Dickenson’s Alien Abduction
Thistle, pokeweed, Johnson grass bully
seedlings: radishes, Swiss chard, sorrel.
I defend these children with hands and trowel.
Trying to be a good man is useless.
Ordinary acts are lethal:
shave, grind coffee, car tires, ice cubes.
Judiciously as Solomon
I would throttle the berserker cat
to rescue the helpless crippled one.
My murders usually have less tinsel:
eat a peregrine apple, this pencil.
In a second language, our eon’s
evangelical desertion of meaning—
struck, maimed, robbed, a cipher with only
the purchase of language. To buy is the why.
The following morning’s embers lisp.
Birdsong is dawn’s smallest news
of creation cracked apart. A soft
eclipse of attention clarifies our noise.
The earth’s most populated continent
of grief and forfeit becomes more evident.
Behold the pleroma of this commons.
Behold. Be held. Hold still and be,
be held in beholding. Italicize
the habitually unnoticed constellation,
the neighbors’ preappointed pain.
No purchase semaphores these majestic whys.
Alla Vostra Luna
Stones in mouth to strengthen voice.
Split along the axis from navel
to nose and ground to endless dust,
loves gust me through the lyre’s close strings.
You send me Moon, the last dancer’s arm
at curtain drop of September night.
Her waning torso arches across
fallen light and summer’s ending.
You know the need for turns. Your hand
warm against the back of my neck,
this touch engineers loops of departure
and return, ascents of shimmering orbs,
skies even easter than us, as Moon
returns more russetly in October.
Remember October. Remember fall.