Alex Jennings

MXYZPTLK

Some words mean the opposite of their definitions
Finery
Whore
Forgetfulness
Loss
An echo is not sound, but the sound of sound.
Its memory.

These words fold, backwards, from the air.
Fashioned like aluminum petals by brittle voices
Sipped like drugged drink
They damage the brain,
Derange the senses.

What is my vocabulary?
Am I not what I am?
Am I my best guess?
The limit of my imperfect senses?
The backward speech of a four-color sorceress
I am not
I am not
I am
Not

Once, I stood beside a wooded path
And watched the dead boys rise from hidden graves
Falling in reverse, their shattered skulls knitting
Their kissed-on wounds closing lips.

Unmurdered by stones
Unmourned by healed parents
The past has not passed
The bodies unrest
A secret is not a secret if it remains untold

What is the nonsense incantation
That rolls the stone away?
What word replaces the Thylocenes in their burrows?
If I knew that silent language
I’d unmake my memories of you.
unwound you, unmortify spirit-flesh
And you would never have saved me.

Listen, listen.
Alived boys whistle
Walking backwards among the trees

Marching with their backs turned home.


Alex reads "Mxyzptlk":



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Alex confesses: "Mxyzptlk is an extradimensional Superman villain only banished if tricked into saying his name backwards. Too many people have disappeared in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. This poem imagines what led to those crimes and wishes they could be undone."


ALEX JENNINGS's writing has appeared in Ellipsis, New Suns: Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. He is also the recipient of the 2010 Ryan Chighizola Poetry Prize. He lives and works in New Orleans.