The Flying Saucer Poetry Review, Winter 2023 (issue #2)

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43 | Poetry by Jerome Berglund, Winner of the Setu Award for Excellence


Meteor & Other SciFaiku

meteor
into the sea
starts to bubble

(Re Cloverfield opening)

near secluded base
grandkids take in light show
over Lake Pleasant

(shasei [a sketch from life], based on a childhood sighting — probably experimental aircraft testing?)

probing questions —
explaining the missing time
and mutilated cattle

(Re “Usually, explicit memories of the abduction experience will not be present, and the abductee will only realize they have experienced ‘missing time’ upon checking a timepiece.”)

easy to get backwards
Collective and Star Fleet credos
more so from Cube

(Re Borg, in Star Trek: Next Generation, luxury fully-automated futurism)

otherwordly locusts
rolling over townsfolk
picking the land clean

(Re Critters franchise, extractivism)

Autopsying
the alien . . .
Heavy smoker?!

(Re alien autopsy and a favorite X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”)

callous subset
when fish run dry
the dolphins bounce

(Re The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

wobbling saucer
blunders along
American made

(Re The Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar [secret U.S. military project attempting to harness the Coandă effect])

malamute kennel
in the night
silently mutating

(Re The Thing)

hope for
the well-traveled
Posadas beams

(Re “Beginning in 1968, Posadas also became known for his theories concerning UFOs and extraterrestrial life. If anything like UFOs existed, they could demonstrate the existence of agents able to master a very sophisticated technology, something that would be compatible with what in this planet was advocated by socialism. If UFOs existed, they could be allied in addressing some of the major problems in the earth.”)

Jerome Berglund

Jerome Berglund has many haiku, senryu and tanka exhibited and forthcoming online and in print, most recently in the Asahi Shimbun, Bear Creek Haiku, Bamboo Hut, Bottle Rockets, Cold Moon Journal, Daily Haiga, Failed Haiku, Frogpond, Haiku Dialogue, Haiku Seed, Horror Senryu Journal, Japan Society, Poetry Pea, Scarlet Dragonfly, The Starlight SciFaiku Review, The SciKu Project, Scifaikuest, Suspect Device Zine, Triya, Under the Basho, Wales Haiku Journal, and The Zen Space.