My Sister Said She Saw a UFO

and I asked her what a UFO is
and she said it’s an unidentified flying object
and I told her it’s not impressive to see something unidentifiable.
All you have to do is squint
and have somebody throw something
and you won’t be sure what it is.
She said that, no, it has to be something high up in the sky.
And so I squinted and looked up and pointed.
“What’s that?” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
I opened my eyes all the way.
“Oh, it’s a cloud,” I said, “It was a UFO for a while there.”
She said, “You’re an idiot.”
I said, “Blee-zip-bo-zid.”
She started walking away,
so I said that I was a Martian
and she said that space is infinite,
so the odds of there being extraterrestrials
is one hundred percent.
I asked her what terrestrials are
and she said, “No, extraterrestrials!”
and I said, “Yeah, I know that they’re terrestrials who are extra,
but what does that mean?”
She said it means I’m an idiot.
I said, “Blee-scoop-fleezle”
and she punched me in the cheek.
It started swelling up.
I went in the house and looked in the mirror.
With the swelling, I looked like an extraterrestrial.
I kept staring at myself, wondering if I was one.
I still do that sometimes.
Especially when I’m on the spaceship.

The Thing I Love about Space Travel

is that all travel is space travel.
Without space, you can’t travel.
Space travel without space
is just standing there.
My father taught me that.
We were just standing there,
fishing, and all the fish were
doing space travel in the water,
just little astronauts in the blue
wet cosmos. And I asked my dad
what he wanted to be when he grew up
and he said, “I am grown up”
and I said, “No, when you were young,”
and he said, “I always wanted to be
an astronaut” and I said,
“What? Do you mean a fish?”
and he said, “What?”
and I said, “Fish are astronauts”
and he said, “No, they’re not”
and I said, “Astronauts are fish,”
and then he just got all quiet
because sometimes he gets afraid of me,
afraid of my thoughts,
so I just looked down at all the astronauts
and they looked stupid and lost,
just like real astronauts.

In Middle School, I Was in a Spelling Bee and They Had Me Spell Astronaut

and I said a-s-s-
and then I tried to take an s back,
but you can’t take s’s back in spelling bees.
It’s like once you’ve said it,
then the ass just hovers there forever.
There was snickering in the auditorium,
because I’d made it really far
and no one is supposed to make mistakes
when you get around the really creepy genius kids
like we were supposed to be,
the type of kids who spell chrysanthemum or kibosh
like you’re almost angry you got asked to spell something so simple.
There were only twelve of us left,
so it was like the Last Supper, but with spelling,
and this was after hundreds of kids had failed.
One kid was asked to spell cat and he said d-o-g
and later I asked why he did that
and he said because he prefers sitting down to standing.
That was way back at the beginning.
In the beginning, they asked me words like “words” and “like” and “me,”
words that were sort of insulting to spell.
Then weeks later
when there’s goddamn prize money at stake
and groupies at stake
and huge spelling bee contracts at stake,
they ask me astronaut
and I said, “a-s-s-” and the laughter started,
and so I realized it was all over,
that I’d just put my name in the History Books of Goddamnit,
so I just kept going with it
and said “a-s-s-f-a-c-e-s-I-k-n-e-w-h-o-w-t-o-s-p-e-l-l-t-h-e-w-o-r-d-b-u-t-t-h-e-s-e-r-u-l-e-s-a-r-e-s-t-u-p-i-d”
and by the time I sat down I realized that no one knew I was actually spelling a sentence;
they just thought I was insane,
so a girl who was in the seat next to me where all the losers were
moved over like she was scared of me
so I was all alone in my seat,
sort of how astronauts must feel.

Ron Riekki wrote My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), U.P.: a novel (Ghost Road Press), and Posttraumatic: A Memoir (Small Press Distribution).  He edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (MSU Press), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book), The Many Lives of The Evil Dead: Essays on the Cult Film Franchise (McFarland).

Art by Jack Roberts