Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
First Contact
You loom over me, you burn
above, a cigar-shaped mothership scorching my tuft.
I’m the Show-Me-State farmer immobilized by you.
When you’re done with me, there’s missing time,
a deep scoop-mark or three on my thigh.
A tracking device throbs below my hairline.
Our double-sided toys return to their drawer.
You and I febreze your pillowtop,
tawny as raw cane sugar, and the box
springs, the ottoman where we began.
The smell of pug-waste lingers.
We make the bed, I see your happy trail’s
braided like Saturn’s F-ring, your beard-body,
at the sternum, has a hairless
Arecibo dish where you receive 120 million
simultaneous channels from the Milky Way—I sort
through them, wirelessly,
for the breakthrough signal. Just one chord
of ancient song. I also listen for signs of death.
Greg Wrenn’s first book, Centaur, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2013 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in AGNI, The Best American Poetry 2014, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. He has completed a second collection of poems, Northwest Passage, and is at work on a series of linked essays about coral reefs, impermanence, and human destiny. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Stanford University. His website is at gregwrenn.com. (updated 3/2015)