Ellen Welcker
That Bizness in the Sky
There’s a story I love, about a boy who looks inside a trashcan, because—why? Haven’t you?
He finds a maggot, his mother lets him keep it.
I change the boy to a girl. I change the girl’s eyes to yellow. Everyone has an opinion on her. She stands for all we have lost or want to destroy. Now I change her back into the boy.
He dreams a typical, terrible, typical dream:
I say ‘no’ but no
one hears me.
Then an animal eats his back. Writhing, he cries:
I want to go downstairs
I want to go downstairs
and eat my breakfast
and hide.
Where will he hide? The weather is grey. Now he’s the girl whose ears prick and swivel.
Back to the boy who loves the maggot.
Who loves the maggot so.
Ellen Welcker’s books are Ram Hands (Scablands Books, fall 2016) and The Botanical Garden, which was selected by Eleni Sikelianos for the 2009 Astrophil Poetry Prize (Astrophil, 2010). Chapbooks include The Pink Tablet, forthcoming in 2017 from Fact-Simile Books; Mouth That Tastes of Gasoline (alice blue, 2014); and The Urban Lightwing Professionals (H_NGM_N, 2011). Recent poems are in Okey-Panky, Gramma Daily, and the anthology WA 129, and forthcoming in Poetry Northwest. She is a 2016 WA State Artist Trust GAP grant recipient, and she lives in Spokane.
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