Ancient Aliens

While you’re Just doin’ weekend chores 
with your boyfriend (or is it fiancé now?), 
I’m gorging again on the History Channel, 
trying to convince myself I might meet 
someone at the gym if I could just levitate
from my sofa with the same ease and grace 
Chinese myths assigned to “flying dragons” 
some PhD (with a Flock of Seagulls haircut) 
insists were aircraft awing naïve ancestors.

They just didn’t have a name for it.

I didn’t have a name for it either. The alien 
sensation that descended that afternoon 
your boyfriend—my longtime friend— 
finally introduced his new beau. A hand- 
shake charged like the jolt that same PhD 
suggests was not the lightning of Zeus 
scalding humans from Mount Olympus 
(perhaps for a vice like coveting?) but
a glowing beam, some otherworldly force 
from some bird-thing landing from beyond. 
The aliens suddenly all the men I believed 
I had loved. Dwarfed now from the top
of a pyramid I couldn’t recall climbing. 
Always falling short. Not enough. Not it.

Whatever it was.

I just never had a name for it. Until you 
offered yours. And I was struck, dumb, 
a stargazing primitive willing to carve
your likeness into cavern walls, learn 
your language, spend a whole lifetime 
flattening the earth into a landing pad 
so you might visit again.

Read more from Issue 16.2.