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ALEXANDER JAMES
REINCARNATION
You started crying at lunch
into your bowl of pasta and sardines.
We had been talking.
If we die, we will come back
as elephant and as bird.
The bird will sit
on the elephant’s back
and look out across the Savannah.
That’s fine, you said. You were crying
because birds don't live
particularly long. And elephants
never forget. So elephant-me
would live decades, without bird-you.
I told you to finish the pasta.
BOT VILLAGE
They were discovered
on Monday. Nine-thirty
in the morning.
A new civilization
emanating from a basement
in Ukraine.
They had friends, families, neighbours
scraped in slivers from
the cliff face of
ordinary lives.
Wheatpaste stories
cut from snippets from shards
of news. Fragments of
a message, dropped forgotten
as breadcrumbs at a feast.
Passed along, traded.
Digital shadows.
Digital shades.
I wish you
a supreme birthday
one said to another.
Then it shared a
highlight reel of train crashes.
We annihilated them,
we had to. The temerity
of holding a lead mirror
to us, that's one thing.
But to sit at our table
and pretend not to
be eaten?
Alexander James is a poet and writer based in West London. His works have been featured in Rattle, After the Pause, Riddled with Arrows and others. You can see more of his poems, in English and Chinese, at facebook.com/grasshopperpoetry/