A NOTE FOR THE JOVIANS by Carl Boon

There’s coffee here, and we love each other
so much we can’t imagine a world without it.
Some of us bloody ourselves for love,
some of us built trenches the last century
and murdered strangers with machines
to make love last, confusing it with borders,
oil, water, freedom, all of what you’ve left behind.
You’ve greater concerns, like how to move
and why the helium surrounds you, like
mitochondria and how to be when being’s
fraught with gas and obstinate thunder,
then nothing for a million years. I admire you—
I wish you could see us. My lover’s lying in a room
watching your planet from the window,
watching and imagining your souls scraping
hydrogen from rock, watching as the blurred
earth light makes you wonder what else. We are
mostly happy here; we put our bodies down
for a while and dream of you becoming us.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University. Twitter: @hiway61carl