Ellen Welcker
Abstractions
I love you, she said, but I love Earth a little bit more.
It was clear she felt bad saying it. A flawless explanation followed.
The totalitarianism of the lanternfish has no song in it.
To absorb one’s mate is a devastating miracle. Remoras
hover around the gills, feeding on fecal exposition like a ghost crab,
in other words, like an education. And the hammerhead
shark is an education. And the great blue whale is an education.
The blobfish, right now, is in a decanter with its own ice cooler.
It’s an exhibition, an emptying out, a devastation.
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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