John Buckley and Martin Ott
GALACTUS FEELS HIS AGE
The bald spot, the pulled back muscle, the ache in the joints
when local nebulas ran moist. He had hoped to make it to
fifteen, maybe sixteen billion before his teeth grew sensitive.
His indigestion was epic, thousands of gulped planets and moons
ground to a clump somewhere inside, and the voices he heard
might have been solar winds or guilt as his amateur psychologist
the Watcher probed for repressed memories of a past-universe
childhood. But he didn't remember any toilet-training traumas
on Taa, or nap-time, or enough of either parent. No Oedipal urge
arose from the legion of heralds he enlisted to find him planets
with people inside, a tasty reminder that he was once a speck
on a universe collapsing in on itself. Now he could only gum down
the softest of gas giants on a regular basis, saving more savory
Class-M treats for special occasions. Phlogiston-7C left the wrong
sort of fire in his belly. He'd soon had to devour the ice world Mooth
before Silver Surfer told him the truths of self-medication and self-
loathing, hunger that tricked a mythic serpent into gulping its tail.
He dabbled in universal mediation but there was no safe haven
from disrepair, square meters of knee cartilage popping as he
sat criss-cross applesauce on his cosmic yoga mat, summoning
his vast will to try one more sweaty transition into downward dog.
He never had this much trouble sleeping before, counting stars
he desired, counting wives he'd lost, counting time before the after
and after the before, the jittery constellations of grief he wore.
The bald spot, the pulled back muscle, the ache in the joints
when local nebulas ran moist. He had hoped to make it to
fifteen, maybe sixteen billion before his teeth grew sensitive.
His indigestion was epic, thousands of gulped planets and moons
ground to a clump somewhere inside, and the voices he heard
might have been solar winds or guilt as his amateur psychologist
the Watcher probed for repressed memories of a past-universe
childhood. But he didn't remember any toilet-training traumas
on Taa, or nap-time, or enough of either parent. No Oedipal urge
arose from the legion of heralds he enlisted to find him planets
with people inside, a tasty reminder that he was once a speck
on a universe collapsing in on itself. Now he could only gum down
the softest of gas giants on a regular basis, saving more savory
Class-M treats for special occasions. Phlogiston-7C left the wrong
sort of fire in his belly. He'd soon had to devour the ice world Mooth
before Silver Surfer told him the truths of self-medication and self-
loathing, hunger that tricked a mythic serpent into gulping its tail.
He dabbled in universal mediation but there was no safe haven
from disrepair, square meters of knee cartilage popping as he
sat criss-cross applesauce on his cosmic yoga mat, summoning
his vast will to try one more sweaty transition into downward dog.
He never had this much trouble sleeping before, counting stars
he desired, counting wives he'd lost, counting time before the after
and after the before, the jittery constellations of grief he wore.
John Buckley and Martin Ott began their ongoing games of poetic volleyball in the spring of 2009. Since then, their collaborations have been accepted into more than seventy journals and anthologies, including Barrow Street, Drawn to Marvel, Map Literary, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, Redivider, and ZYZZYVA, and gathered into two full-length collections on Brooklyn Arts Press, Poets’ Guide to America (2012) and Yankee Broadcast Network (2014). They are now writing poems for a third manuscript, American Wonder, about superheroes and supervillains.