Two Poems from Oily Doily
Commercial break
disposed intent
handly may
breakthru
up to
scrim fill in the
________
assent
locus clean | ed
wide net
happy mid
purchase takes
just this
tomorrow’s
tomorrow
tomorrows
a focal
group salvo
five-in-one play
amen seaside
femoral ache
happy fathers day
plastic waterway
from Pool
When it happened when I saw it we were driving in a
red rock desert. JC saw it too we saw it then not and
that was what surprised us. Maybe people often saw
flying objects disappear there but for several years I
didn’t tell anyone it was afternoon late spring high
visibility sound mind and so on route 24.
That morning we’d departed the park named for an
allocated heaven crossing into open range snow on
the plain around one stopped for some minutes as
steers walked up the asphalt’s exposed strips. Their
looks bore in a bad old dream or it could be they
were staring out the windscreen at themselves the
cloudbanks low and crawled up the road.
It rained
on the road
between reef
and grove
then in
the clear
air advanced
a wedge
a contoured
wedge
a gunmetal
pentagonal
it loomed
overhead
then wasn’t
not wasn’t
the image
slammed shut
A thermal inversion occurs when air is hotter higher
warm air rises trapping cold pollution in Missouri
try it on a research farm with a red smoke bomb
pastel fog puddles on the bean crop the hot hot lens
ungrounds lifts and disperses forms up on horizon
angelic Herefords for instance inverted or some form
of curved polyhedron location is no indicator of actual
object location no more illusion than mirror but distorted
may elicit a scene its observer misinterprets is it moving
have you found a mirage to settle itself directly around
I have copied out the proceedings in which the ex-pilot
addresses the commission, and will fail to convince
now the radiant present
the last extractive shortwave rays
bombard the oceanic
play back again his recorded statement
the cockpit video that shows it seems no living
proof but clouds you filmed clouds
why did you I saw traces
of two men
the physicist father farther lost in dark and distant
undulations of the waves quickly lost him
in the undulations of the oceanic brain
in the folds the undulations
that alien in the folded
pulse of imitation
it holds him in anyone that would be
destroyer, son abandoned
a wife and
it molds his closest secret a surface he can touch as
the would-be was-and
pervades him
now the present bombardment, now and then
Looked at
looked past
a crack
in the wind
shield broken
in sister’s
HS parking acc
the accord
somehowed
the garage
I didn’t ask
received
a potential
dad’s later
warning
if an acc
the edge
of glass
eventually
he said
decap
So replaced
the glass
the break
came back
replaced
the glass
again it
cracked
replacing
its breaking
so break from
replacing
let be
a warp in
the chassis
I was being drawn along the road the sky a round open
window didn’t hear it approach but saw the surface flow
don’t know if it was a jet could be inaccurate whatever
it was an overhead F- the shining F-s we watched
like the elect and as we watched surprise it vanished
sleight of paint mirror temperature to look and not to see
what form accelerated its post-facto vision a neutral mask
the featureless look the console glass robotic cockpit
aerial drill reflective tint placid surfactant it scrubs away
it appliques the timeless craters to a nowhere place
are we meant to see we are not meant to see is not
to see it seems to portend a future of endless vision
stretched no horizon but the locked coordinates
∩
Alyssa Perry is a writer, editor, and teacher from Iowa. She is the author of Oily Doily (Bench Editions, 2024). Her writing appears with Annulet, The Canary, Coma, Fence, Mercury Firs, River Styx, the Experimental Sound Studio, and other venues. Perry is poetry editor at the Cleveland Review of Books and an editor at the small press publisher Rescue Press. She lives in Ohio and teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.