Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2025
Immigrants from Outer Space, poems by John Philip Drury.
Immigrants from Outer Space
(Imaginary Movie)
through galaxies—it’s easy to imagine
unimaginable speeds—and enters
the Milky Way (so fast and yet so graceful),
breaching our solar system, zooming in
on our blue planet. We can hear what sounds
like beeping on a video game and wind-chimes
but see subtitles flashing on the screen.
And then we see the crew: big heads whose eyes
are multi-faceted; metallic tunics;
prehensile tentacles or tendrils busy
at banks of instruments and screens and buttons.
Aliens invading! Parasites
from outer space who want to suck our bodies,
pollute the planet even worse than we have!
Several have gathered in an air-locked chamber
where we can see their personalities:
gruff leader, wily first mate, taciturn
explosives expert, sweet clown, jolly cook.
Who knows what sexes any of them are?
They board a pod and launch themselves toward earth,
floating to a clearing in a forest—
some boulders, Spanish moss on trees, a pond.
When they emerge, it’s quiet, at least at first.
They burble in their native tongues (except
they have no tongues), the captions quick and witty.
We’re waiting for a fisherman to blunder
into the clearing, scream, be zapped by blasters.
But the surprise comes when a little creature
lifts its long neck from the watering hole
and shows us what it is: a dinosaur.
They’ve landed in the Cretaceous Period!
They make a pet of their first saurian
and bring it to the spaceship. High jinx follow
on board—they’re racing down curved corridors—
but further scouting expeditions find
Tyrannosaurus Rex, and then it’s war.
Our sympathies are with the aliens.
Will they succeed and one of them, a freak,
become the common ancestor of humans,
evolving past the compound eye and feelers?
Of course not. They are just too alien.
The mother-ship, which really is enormous,
is running out of fuel. And when it crashes,
it is the meteor that brings destruction,
exterminating all the dinosaurs.
Special effects are paramount. It’s really
a silent movie when it comes to language,
though full of noise that hurts us in the gut.
Now all you need is Aristophanes
or some archaic, obsolete enchanter
to write subtitles. That’s how to humanize
the monsters, integrate what’s alien,
and start repairing what blockbusters crush.
Catechism of Grief
What did your mother call eyelashes?
Winkers.
“Honey, I’ll get it out,” she said, “hold still”
when one came loose and needled my inner eyelid.
What did she tell you when you woke up sick?
“Honey, you’ve caught a bug, you’ve got the grippe,
the creeping crud.” She covered me with mounds
of blankets so I’d sweat the fever out.
How did she treat a cold?
Doses of beef
wine and iron, plus Coca-Cola syrup,
and spoonfuls of Vick’s Vap-O-Rub—thick gobs,
cool, burning down my gullet, even though
directions said, “Not for internal use.”
What did she do in winter?
Make snow-cream
during a blizzard, sugar and vanilla
mixed with the cups of snowfall. How I hated
when clouds of nuclear fallout made the snow
too dangerous to treat as a dessert!
How did she deal with lying?
She declared,
“I’ll never spank you if you tell the truth.”
How did she think of you, her only son?
She claimed, “I think of you as more a friend.”
How do you miss her?
Exponentially.
She’s like a famished ghost who won’t let go.
Encounter on a Barrier Island
Looking for wild horses on Assateague,
we slowed down for a red fox crossing the road
as wind-blown sand was moseying along.
It looked directly at our gaze, our braking Beetle,
and told me, prophesying, You’re not a we,
but I will always be the fox you lucked
into glimpsing. Half that we has now dissolved,
but the broken, bleached blacktop of a road
beside the ocean just beyond dune grass
will always hold a fox, pausing, daring me
to ease my foot off the worn brake pedal,
which I can never do. My only fox,
my distant, cold, and fiery scold of a muse.
© John Philip Drury
John Philip Drury is the author of six poetry collections: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and most recently The Teller’s Cage (Able Muse Press, 2024). His first book of narrative nonfiction, Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.