“Space Invaders” by Roxanna Bennett
Childhood: recurring UFO’s illuminated her nights, ladders
swung from stratospheric heights, detached manner
of the doctors who sliced and examined her
small parts, cataloguing ribs, spine, clavicle, femurs
in their labelled containers, cubed the meatier
bits, murmured over their findings before the cure
and connect, numb reconstruct, then the body’s transfer
to the bed miles below. She always woke up tender
but whole. Years later she watched cinema aliens plunder
an abductee with crude three fingered tools, the actor’s
Oscar nominated scream of wide mouthed terror
foreign to her own dim memory of the operating chamber.
Disturbed she conferred with her medical practitioner
who gently referred her to a licensed counsellor
trained to erase the layers of lies the brain’s projectors
play behind the eyes, the clever mind protector
of the wordless young who storyboard horror
they can’t comprehend, recast uncles, fathers,
as characters, kindly doctors, space invaders;
they never meant to leave these permanent scars.
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Roxanna Bennett’s Artist Statement: Roxanna Bennett is the author of The Uncertainty Principle: Poems (Tightrope Books, 2014) and senior editor for Matrix Magazine. Her work has appeared in Slice Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, Existere, Arc, Vallum, CV2, Cosmonauts Avenue, Qwerty, carte blanche, and many other publications. She is a bisexual writer living with multiple disabilities in Ontario, Canada.
