Anthony Immergluck

In a Tent

Two weeks in a tent with Julio,
who I hardly knew, on an isle
in a piney sound, buttered with fog. 

There were kayaks in grayscale.
Roots undressed in mudslides
and pressed into our spines.

One night, huddled in a storm,
he mixed us margaritas in his Nalgene
and laid out a little bag for cigarette butts. 

Insomniacs in binary orbit, we
stared through the convertible flap
at the rain and the stars–

unyielding and transient bodies
of astonishing chemical breadth,
phasing in and out of eclipse.

We spoke at length about the way
the wire-weed and Dead Man’s
Fingers lingered on our oars;

those precious days when crabbers
passed, honked their klaxons
and waved from the aft. 

The stars, he offered, were a kind
of archipelago, insofar as space
could be seen as a kind of sound.

And he asked what I knew about the visitors.

Well, of course you got your Grays,
he said. Zeta Reticulians. They
do most of the abducting.

You’ve got Reptilians. And Nordics
from the Pleiades. Andromedans:
beings like light on a mirror.

And in that drumming
of the wind against the tent,
he asked if I was afraid.

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Anthony Immergluck is a poet, publishing professional, and musician with an MFA in Poetry from New York University–Paris. His poems are featured in journals such as Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and Tahoma Literary Review. Immergluck works in academic publishing and lives in Madison, WI, with his wife and pit bull.