April 2017
Laurel Peterson
laurelpeterson@att.net
laurelpeterson@att.net
I’ve been writing since I was eight, despite being told that I shouldn’t. Writing revealed too much. This is why I tell my students they should never be afraid to put the truth on the page. I’m a community college English professor, who alternately loves and despairs of her students. I’ve written lots of different things—newspaper columns, academic stuff, poems (including two chapbooks and a forthcoming full-length collection) and a couple of mystery novels, one of which will be published this spring by Barking Rain Press. I have the very great pleasure of serving the town of Norwalk, Connecticut, as its poet laureate. At this very moment, my dog is sniffing through my trash for a draft of something to chew on. My website: www.laurelpeterson.com
UFOS
“People who report such stuff—chiefly airline pilots and ground staff—cannot be quite right in the head!”
-From Flying Saucers, C. G. Jung
Believing was a risk
among scientific men
concerned with windshear,
altimeters, the proximity of birds.
And yet, he’d see it,
floating just to the left,
like something in his eye,
something he’d rubbed at,
which refused to disappear.
From what buried corner
of his psyche had it emerged,
rising up from the fertile ground
of Zion, Illinois,
home to faith-based healers
and mass baptism?
Somewhere, there’s always a threat,
a darkness that has coalesced
into a disc that spins, rises, dips
against all his known aerodynamic laws.
He couldn’t help but believe.
He’d seen it with his own eyes,
whose neuronal connections
held hidden short circuits
or trip wires,
things that shape-shifted the message.
At least he’d never been taken
like some he’d read about,
their memories altered
by rubbery, big-eyed aliens,
who poked them with needles
and sent them screaming and reborn
into a world now alien.
To him the world had always
felt alien. He much preferred
flying above it,
its tiny houses and violences
thirty-nine thousand feet below.
“People who report such stuff—chiefly airline pilots and ground staff—cannot be quite right in the head!”
-From Flying Saucers, C. G. Jung
Believing was a risk
among scientific men
concerned with windshear,
altimeters, the proximity of birds.
And yet, he’d see it,
floating just to the left,
like something in his eye,
something he’d rubbed at,
which refused to disappear.
From what buried corner
of his psyche had it emerged,
rising up from the fertile ground
of Zion, Illinois,
home to faith-based healers
and mass baptism?
Somewhere, there’s always a threat,
a darkness that has coalesced
into a disc that spins, rises, dips
against all his known aerodynamic laws.
He couldn’t help but believe.
He’d seen it with his own eyes,
whose neuronal connections
held hidden short circuits
or trip wires,
things that shape-shifted the message.
At least he’d never been taken
like some he’d read about,
their memories altered
by rubbery, big-eyed aliens,
who poked them with needles
and sent them screaming and reborn
into a world now alien.
To him the world had always
felt alien. He much preferred
flying above it,
its tiny houses and violences
thirty-nine thousand feet below.
© 2017 Laurel Peterson
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