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.