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.
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.