Using A Hula Hoop Can Get You Abducted By Aliens
by Matthea Harvey

Read the automated transcript.

We’ve never taken anyone
buttoned up and trotting from point A
to point B — subway to office, office to
lunch, fretting over the credit crunch.
Not the ones carefully maneuvering their
whatchamacallits alongside broken white lines,
not the Leash-holders who take their Furries
to the park three point five times per day.
If you’re an integer in that kind of
equation, you belong with your Far-bits
on the ground. We’re seven Star-years
past calculus, so it’s the dreamy ones
who want to go somewhere they don’t know
how to get to that interest us, the ones
who will stare all day at a blank piece of paper
or square of canvas, then peer searchingly into
their herbal tea. It’s true that hula hoops
resemble the rings around Firsthome, and that
when you spin, we chime softly, remembering
Oursummer, Ourspring, and our twelve Otherseasons.
But that’s not the only reason. (Do we like rhyme?
Yes we do. Also your snow, your moss, your tofu—
our sticky hands make it hard for us to put
things down.) Don’t fret, dreamy spinning ones
with water falling from your faces.
It’s us you’re waiting for and we’re coming.

“Using A Hula Hoop Can Get You Abducted By Aliens" by Matthea Harvey. Copyright © 2014 from IF THE TABLOIDS ARE TRUE WHAT ARE YOU? by Matthea Harvey. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.