Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 500 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is a Best of the Net and twice a Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a retired teacher living in Oregon.
Lonely Meanwhile on the edge of a mountain in the middle of Gale Crater a solitary human device crawls for five years the only inhabitant, the last survivor alone on a planet of debris-strewn buttes, river-washed sediments under a red sky. Lonely might not fit. Tread marks appear on the dusty plain below. There were two. They never spoke or crossed paths. The planet is vast. But one stopped working. The second one is climbing now. Tire tracks disappear on smooth rock. There are no voices or echoes. The sound of electric motors is lost in the thin atmosphere. It's a dead world. The machine doesn't know that. It climbs stone, stops to snap a photo of the crater rim for distant humans. From Somewhere Else As her head fell farther into her collar, leathery neck always wrapped in thick wool scarves, tremored hands clutching the arms of her favorite wingback chair, at the end she kept mumbling, I don't live on this planet I don't live on this planet. Where, we wondered, did she come from then, but we never asked. She was too far gone already. Had she floated down on gossamer sleeves from a ship passing in an outer orbit, a comet on a hyperbolic path never to return and she fell like the Little Prince onto a tiny planet among the elephants and foxes, landing in a soft pile of leaves that blew in her face and settled in her hair? From there she stood, lived, then retired to this chair, always waiting for the next body of dust and ice to catch her raised hand, a white beacon. Then she would tell us, see?not from here, a temporary guest, a rainbow through rain a spider web blowing, her frail body a dusty tail searching among the planets.
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