Alien vs. Predator - Michael Robbins' very Unsquirrel-like New Yorker Poem

Here's a very unsquirrel-like poem by Michael Robbins that appeared in the January 12th issue of the New Yorker.

I'm not sure what to make of this poem. But it's very exciting to read. Thrilling. A wild ride.

I'm not saying that the New Yorker should publish a bunch of poems like Michael's. But mixing in more different "stuff" more often would be nice.

Alien vs. Predator


Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.

We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s

berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys

for a living, you’d pray to me, too.

I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.



That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree

making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.

I set the controls, I pioneer

the seeding of the ionosphere.

I translate the Bible into velociraptor.



In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,

but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?

I fight the comets, lick the moon,

pave its lonely streets.

The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.



I go by many names: Buju Banton,

Camel Light, the New York Times.

Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.

I have few legs. I sleep on meat.

I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

Squirrel Poem (Elisa Gabbert) and Art (?)- (me)

Elisa Gabbert responded to my post about New Yorker Squirrel poems. Here's her Squirrel (literally) Poem. This "Squirrel" (?) first appeared in the Raleigh Quarterly


Elegy at Chestnut and River

Squirrel in the road, squashed
to an outline of itself: cute,
even in death. I can’t miss it

if I never knew it. Can I?
If I pick it up, it will weigh
either more or less

than I expect. Will smear
a little blood on my fingers.
It will smell rich.


It’s a squirrel: not
looking for a monument
or a headstone. It wants

to be left in the street,
the spot where it was last
alive, stuck in a running-

across shape. It wants to keep
running forever, but
it can’t stop stopping.





If you've got a Squirrel or Animal or Object poem that you think I'd find appropriate to post here with illustration send it to me please! I'm wanting to do a few more of these. If they strike me right, of course.



Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent. Her recent poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Diagram, Eleven Eleven, Meridian, Pleiades, Typo and Washington Square. A chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press. She is also the author, with Kathleen Rooney, of Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths Books, 2008). Their collaborations can be found in Boston Review, Caketrain, jubilat, No Tell Motel and other journals.


And, sorry, no mocking.