36 | Poetry by Joshua Gage, Winner of the Haiku Society of America Senryu Award
Hopkinsville Goblins
Your craft, O Little Green Men, sweeps past comets
and deep into Kentucky’s yellow poplars.
Rainbow-haze exhaust plume swirls permit
the flares of buckshot, which keep you distant,
like flaming hounds who bark a barricade
of conflagrating howls at tiny immigrants,
damning all your glowing eyes to blindness,
and execrating your pointed ears to Hell.
Look now, already on the cold horizon,
Fort Campbell burns the shadows with its headlights
And your craft, O Little Green Men, departs
beyond our radar’s gaze, back to the stars.
Offensive Maneuvers
— in memory of Felix Moncala and Robert Wilson
Every time the Scorpion jet surged
the waters of Lake Superior,
a saucer darted in the way.
Wherever it went,
it rippled the horizon,
until it swept
in a tight wingover
to the right,
because of the saucer.
or until it rolled
in a heart-pounding Immelman
because of the saucer.
The Scorpion screamed.
The saucer kept blinking,
to the right, to the left,
then
disappeared entirely.
Later, the radar operator
closes his blood-shot eyes,
swallows another glass of rye
to drown away the green blips
that haunt his sleep.
Baseball in Montana
The bear grass withers in Great Falls.
Soon the western tanagers will flame from out the evergreens.
Soon the boys of summer will return to work
In the factories of their fathers.
Tell me, Mr. Mariana,
when was it that your CineKodak camera
caught silver in the sky
instead of training reels?
The outfield grass lifts my body heavenward.
The whir of saucers denies me sleep.
Joshua Gage
Joshua Gage is an ornery curmudgeon from Cleveland. His newest chapbook, Origami Lilies, is available on Poet’s Haven Press. He is a graduate of the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Naropa University. He has a penchant for Pendleton shirts, Ethiopian coffee, and any poem strong enough to yank the breath out of his lungs.
Editor’s Note: Recently, Joshua and the other twelve members of the Poets Thirteen were nominated for the Pushcart Prize by this publishing house for their renku, “Quantum Entanglement,” which appeared in the debut issue of The Lotus Tree Literary Review.