Sample Poems by Kim Roberts and Michael Gushue

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I Have So Many Questions After Watching When Worlds Collide
Kim Roberts

How would you spend your final days?
Lighting cigarettes with large denomination bills, like

Jack? Or questioning your choice of mate, like
Joyce? In denial? Anger? Bargaining? Depression?

Computing statistics on a Differential Analyzer? How depressing
to pin all your meager hopes

on one of the spaceship’s 44 slender seats. Hope
won’t keep Zyra from passing so close to Earth

that it causes tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, fires, earth-
quakes, typhoons. Then, just 19 days after,

the planet Bellus will collide. This is my favorite part: after
mass evacuations inland, in the once great

coastal cities, only massive waves fill the streets. Great
crashing tidal waves topple high-rises. Waste anything except time,

the signs in the work camp read. Our shortest material is time.
There’s so little we can save. Adopt

a tow-headed orphan, who then adopts
a stray mutt. What’s 40 extra pounds

on our modern Noah’s Ark? Brace yourself! Pounded
by pressure, the scientists (or is it the filmmakers?) fall

back on the fantasy of a homogeneous future, a before-the-Fall,
pre-lapsarian Eden where it seems there’s only room

if you’re white. If you’re white, you can draw lots for room
aboard ship. Or you can join a gang, pull a gun, and try to force

your way on. What would you do? Force
your fiancé to give up his prior claim? Sacrifice your seat for your lover?

What good is love
when planets collide? I ask you: How well do you know

yourself? Until Earth’s demise is imminent, can you truly know
how you would spend your final days?

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I Have The Answers to When Worlds Collide
Michael Gushue

Photographic plates and Differential
Analyzers never lie: we’re all doomed.

Dave Randall lies about his passenger—
she’s a cutie pie, not an old auntie—

while astronomers in South Africa
wait on pins and needles for him to fly

those plates to Dr. Hendron in New York.
They show, hurtling toward us, a rogue star

and planet with names like strippers, Bellus
and Zyra. They’ll obliterate the earth.

The United Nations and Congress scoff.
You can prove any malarkey with facts.

With barely time to build a space ark
three plutocrats ante up the cash.

They hoodwink suppliers and employees:
with the Earth smashed, money is worth bubkes.

Hendron’s daughter Joyce falls for pilot Dave
but deceives her fiancé about it.

With only eleven days to the end
they toss care packages to flood victims

as if all will be well, annihilation
isn’t waiting around the corner.

Cargo is precisely measured to the ounce,
no more than 40 passengers allowed.

Then an orphan is rescued, then a puppy,
then two sweethearts will be torn apart

by the secret lottery to choose who goes.
Joyce and her pilot too. The calculations,

the lottery, the rules, the timing—all bogus,
all a sham. The ship launches early,

the mean billionaire wasn’t really crippled,
nice Dr. Hendron decides who lives or dies.

Even so the spaceship makes it—passengers
dressed like monks—and lands safely on Zyra.

The bay doors open, Dave and Joyce embrace
against pink grass and aqua mountains.

How many lies do you have to tell yourself
to tell yourself this is a happy ending?

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I Have So Many Questions After Watching The Blob
Kim Roberts

If you can take the word of a rebellious teen,
a boy’s car is his “container,” and Jane

is the first date Steve’s brought to make-out ridge. Jane
with her crinolines and red lipstick, her worried look

after kissing, sneaks out when her parents aren’t looking
to join the gang of teen pranksters, Tony, Mooch, and Gig,

racing their hotrods in reverse down Main Street. The jig’s
up when the meteor falls and cracks open like an egg. Inside

a viscous goo throbs. The old hermit who resides
in a shack goes first, then the nurse and doctor

who treat him. How does the Blob absorb flesh? The doctor’s
“trichlorolitic acid” can’t stop this alien parasite.

Bloated with human blood, the Blob rumbas to each new site,
feeding on the town mechanic, and all the pub patrons, but the police

won’t listen. They suspect more teen angst. The police
just call their parents and send everyone home to bed.

At Weidermeyer’s Grocery, the kids hide in the deep freeze. I’m betting
it’s the end, but no—cold stops the Blob! It disappears

while Jane huddles between hanging sides of beef, then reappears
to ooze through the vents of the projectionist’s booth. Teens run

screaming out of the Colonial Theatre. Next the Blob overruns
a diner, ruby red and grown large enough to encase the whole

building. Who will listen? The teens wake the whole
town with car horns, the air-raid siren, the fire alarm.

How many must die before adults are sufficiently alarmed
to take the word of one rebellious teen?

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I Have The Answers to The Blob
Michael Gushue

What’s up with the Blob?
It plops down from space,

a glob of red goo,
and slurps up a stick

to glue itself to an old
man’s hand. From then on

it bubbles and blebs
its way through the populace

slurps gobbets of guys
into its maw without jaws,

an unstoppable glop,
a malevolent gel.

Steve McQueen hotrods around,
sincere as seersucker.

Though there are gobs of clues
the police are foggy clods:

it will conquer the globe
before a lightbulb goes on.

The Blob balloons bigger,
blood-bloated, oozing

under doors, out of grates,
slithering a supermarket,

mauling a movie theater,
swallowing a hash house whole.

Finally they freeze it
like a popsicle bauble.

Steve McQueen’s a hero.
Phoenixville PA is saved.

But if this scarefest had
happened in England

the monster would be more regal:
We’d run screaming from The Treacle.