by Anne Graue
 |
| Werner Jaisli constructed the 'ovniport' after claiming to have received a 'telepathic message' from aliens. Consisting of a circle of white and brown rocks shaped like a star, the unusual 'landing pad' measures approximately 48 meters in diameter and is situated in the small town of Cachi in the province of Salta. Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 nraliessi / Flickr via Unexplained Mysteries, August 28, 2017 |
Lights in the forest spun, burned the grass. The buzzing sound has never left my ears.
I wake up every morning exhausted, smell sulfurous fog, and know that a ship is in the distance,
maybe on another continent; could be here any minute, take me away, bring me
back. No one would be the wiser.
My mother listened to a radio
program that shared earth's mysteries
I have always known that the Loch Ness Monster was real; I yearned to witness the head
and neck rising out of the water, a scaly throwback to ancient times. Now I watch Nessie
CAM, find documentaries about aliens, giant sea monsters swimming in the waters
off many coasts, and I believe those who claim to have seen these things so obscure and yet
so prevalent, even with a beer and bad camera in hand.
How can so many claim to see what does not exist?
Where are the giant squid?
Scientists create documentaries, separate fact from fiction, the wheat from the chaff, searching
for the monster under the bed, the Yeti in the Himalayas; Sasquatch, and the Zone
of Silence; the Chupacabra, in Mexico and parts of Texas, kills livestock, drinks blood, leaves
nothing but empty shells, carcasses. We seem to have faith in existence without evidence.
She said that someone in Russia found Hell, could hear the screams and suffering
with a device lowered to the depths of, well, Hell, under the earth's crust,
where it ought to be, where they said it was.
So we believe that Sasquatch roams the Oregon forests, the Mothman climbed a bridge
in West Virginia, people have been abducted by extraterrestrials, returned naked to their homes.
Another day she told me Bigfoot traveled through dimensions so would never
be found; that is why he is elusive to capture. When he reappears he may be
a Yeti or he may be the man who claims that he was in the famous Sasquatch film
shown in every documentary. So there it is.
UFOs hover over Phoenix, housewives on Bravo are real, and women are always
the ones who snap.
God
Allah
Buddha
I know what I know.
The ovniport in Argentina lays in wait for the ship to return, and a Nebraska farmer
drives at dusk from fields of hay neatly bailed, sees lights streak across the sky
as if they foretold a story, his story and how he came from a sky of meteors
and constellations, where Pluto was always a planet, and the Big Bang was mute.
Anne Graue is the author of a chapbook, Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press), and has published poems in literary journals and anthologies, includingThe Book of Donuts (Terrapin Books), Blood and Roses: A Devotional for Aphrodite and Venus (Bibliotheca Alexandrina), Gluttony (Pure Slush Books),The Plath Poetry Project, One Sentence Poems, Random Sample Review, Into the Void Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, New Verse News, and Rivet Journal. Originally from Kansas, she lives in New York where she reviews poetry for the Saturday Poetry Series atAsitoughttobe.com and literary magazines and chapbooks for NewPages.com.