On the theme of Amelia Earhart
On the Death of Amelia Earhart, and Related Topics in Plant Biology
Maybe there’s just one too many celebrities
running around, or it’s because every mountain’s
crowned with a flag and those that aren’t
are so effortlessly photoshopped,
but it’d be no big mystery today. We’d find
your gallant obituary jockeying for position
among business mergers and political sex scandals,
a caption for the otherwise nonsensical plot
on the scrolling news ticker in the DMV.
Within days they’d have the wreckage skimmed
off the Pacific and we’d forget it happened
at all, those of us who’d heard.
And if America used to close her fists
to grieve, then today her wide frame is too busy
with the purchasing of hair gloss and munitions
–Be honest: what did you see in that
wild blue desert that needed to be crossed?
All those islands so committed to their internal definition
of patience never even asked to be named.
And a few unlucky ones we’ve designated
as bombed ranges, where a rain of flammable gel
is just one more natural phenomenon they can’t explain:
as surely as the banana leaves glow gold
under sudden interrogation, refusing to surrender
the only secret they think they know
to a question regarding nitrogen fixation
in the soil of our rose gardens,
back home.
Author Biography
Matthew Weiser is a bioinformatics PhD student. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.