Flying Saucer, This Exit
On the super-single, you whisper
into my ear this treatise on mosquito-
rape, faulty bloodlines, your father
and my father. Pretend our hands
are roses, you say, our names written
onto headboards, accidentally,
in the wayward embers of their
cigars. When we take attendance,
our mouths are burning with their
beards. So, we close our eyes and pray
for another alien abduction. Isn’t that
the best thing to do? We are here
or there. We want only to fly away
with Martians shaped like teaspoons,
volunteer for the experiment. They call
this biting of our clavicles, "agricultural
rehab." And so we are corn, we are corn-
snakes, and the venom in our blood jumps
against silk. Lifts off for the most cross-
shaped constellations. Our wrists ringing
against the bedposts tell themselves
they are bells, or paintings of bells.
The aliens, mercifully, smell like
vanilla. We can’t believe they too
have beards. The stars, the tickling
starlight, the waning, waning hurt,
the o-daddy, o-daddy-o. The hands
they use to hold us, the flowers
to hold us down.
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo, the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and two chapbooks. He teaches at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he tempered his gin with two droplets (per 750ml) of tincture of odiferous whitefish liver. For health.
