life

        occasionally

            bursts into being

Shelly Bryant

Memento Mori

It follows gridded ley lines

            of desks     banks sharply

                            flies on     A cow skull

Silence is its vapour trail

        Watch it land          vertically like a harrier

                        on a frozen girl’s open Science book

Gather to sound its starkness

            from an equidistance agreed upon

                           without discussion     A cow skull

Two dark apertures

           built to house

                         gently giant eyes

                        Marble-ridged molars

                                      that through looseness still offer up

                                                      their dust of deathbed grass

                                                      Scribbly-gum sutures

                                                                  bind hemisphere

                                                                             to vaulted hemisphere

Then departure

          through noiseless veil of afterburn

                      Listen for a moment of movement

                                 high above thralled heads         within the retreating

vessel’s void

Porcelain coin

          of bleached snail shell

                        rolls unseen across a field of bone

once and permanent passenger

           grown too large

                          to disembark

Benjamin Dodds

Ridley Scott’s Alien with Moth

ride                                                arrowhead

        slide across massive faces

and hideous         limbs

        preen on white            upholstered

                               bulkheads

                disappear            into