In the Next Life, the Former Cat Thelma
dines on raw carrots
and red grapes, no milk, no meat.
She longs to perch on the arm
of the near-antique chair, still
plush and low to the ground.
She longs to sprawl
over a matching sofa
she does not own yet.
In a one-bedroom condo,
close enough to Atlanta,
in almost-silence, with walls
where tape does not stick,
she is reading a Christmas
comfort book on Zen.
She remembers a woman saying
that humans who devoured meat
would return as dogs and cats.
Her neighbor turns on his stereo.
Too loud, his songs remind her
of her last life: bass, drums,
and saxophones, the days
when she was fascinated
by the carrots and grapes
her people ate.
In My Next Life
I wake to the dark, to a bench,
to the belly of a vast ship
in vaster space. Someone snores.
Someone else walks past,
waves a wand of bells
so that we will all dream
of leaves, of light, of water,
anything that will shimmer,
that will keep us from realizing
that we are not close
to the planet where we will
live and die, never leaving.
In a desert lit by a dimmer sun,
what will we dream of?
I close my eyes to cling
to the shimmer of leaves
above water, a mirror
for bright sun, warm winds.
I shut my eyes to remember
places I’ve only read about,
places I’ve never been to.
The Night the Aliens Came to Worcester
“45 Years Later, Worcester Area Residents Still Say a Large UFO Hovered Over Their City.”
Isabel Sami, Worcester [MA] Telegram, Dec. 22, 2021
Three days before Christmas, snow masked the ground.
Dry and gritty, it glittered beneath moon,
stars, and streetlights. Air scraped our throats and lungs
as if it were sharp metal. Stars seemed so
far away. The moon withdrew from us too.
We’d never fly there again. We lived on
earth. College students drank Budweiser, talked
basketball. The last bus wandered narrow
streets past dark churches, past darker houses.
Water tasted like dank pipes. We drank milk.
That night the white ship, a bulging disk topped
with red lights, swung over the seven hills,
the bus station, the expressway, the tracks
past Union Station, boarded up and blank
like the moon God left hanging in the sky.
A boy and his father ran up a hill
to watch the white ship circle their city.
It might have been searching for a place to land
on the hills, some covered with houses, some
covered with trees, all swaddled in thick snow.
At the last minute, the ship backed away
despite downtown Christmas lights and the mall
as white as if it were made from the moon.
The ones on the ship knew the boarded-up
station and narrow streets were not for them.
Years later, the boy, then a grad student,
watched Star Trek on his black-and-white TV.
He knew this show was the past, the Cold War
never ending, days when we thought we could
visit the moon, could bounce around up there.
He wanted to know if he would ever
meet an alien. He wished that the ship
had landed on the dry, glittering ground.
Beneath the new moon the last bus
passed the all-night store and sighed.
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