Adam Scheffler

Scully and Mulder Go To Couples Therapy

Scully, the couples therapist

is an alien, we’re not really

in a beige room with

four pictures of Frida Khalo,

but in a spaceship

where each unibrow

is a listening device –

we are really in a ritual

conducted by Gengis

Khan’s descendants who

live only to resurrect him –

we are going to be human

sacrifices to the Brer

Rabbit. It’s all true:

the trees that eat children,

every imaginable horror

only a glimpse of all

we fail to imagine. O

Scully your sensible red hair

and suit jacket are in my

mind often, talk me down,

show me my heart’s promptings

are egregious as any demon moon

or ghost crocodile. But is it

not exciting too that everything

I say exists, exists once a few

red herrings of common

sense are splashed back

into the pond of dullness?

Scully, I admire your

name, its feminine death-

liness, its spooky trochee.

Scully, ignore the clipboard,

the alien scribbling, find

the pattern in my own

frenzied words: let’s elope

to an island without telekinetic

girls or alien worms frozen

inside the ice – where I will

tell of my love for you

and you will do everything you

can to disprove it.

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Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and is currently finishing his PhD in English at Harvard. His first book of poems – A Dog’s Life – was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the Jacar Press Poetry Book Contest. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Rattle, North American Review, Verse Daily, and many other venues.