Ander Monson edits Diagram <http://thediagram.com> and the New Michigan Press. These poems are from Vacationland, forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Also forthcoming is Other Electricities, a novel-in-stories, from Sarabande Books. Big Fungus Elegy For X As Meteor Ander Monson Listen, list, my meteor, X, skylight & bright face of rock hook and penitent line horizoning over the top of winter weather systems where WHUH tops out in ionosphere and slivers into half Hank Williams half textbook a < n, half what my terminal grandmother termed what have you in her last pre-departure algebra, Deliver me a post-Christmas blast an FTD flaming pick-me-up bouquet astronomical and expensive as a funeral or build-your-own telescope, or tourniquet, Apply your awful cosmic balm to this skin thin as = or the tiny operations of division that happen all the time, Rub it in to me and rub me out my sci-fi Christ, my matchstick man gone burn with fright and amputation, my father-made my greater-than, my anvil, snap-on tool my doe and antidote, Drive me shotgun like a graph or mafia out to the lichen mass, the Upper Mich. humongous fungus, largest single life in the hemisphere, equation remnant and final evidence of proof or last big-ass design, Finalize my life as light on screen show your work, chiaroscuro set me compass path and coping saw make me lather, lathe, woodburning kit soldering iron and solid precipitated out of my cliché genetic twist cut me ink on stone or stone on flesh raise me exponential, trigonomic, (spell-checker says “tragicomic? ergonomic?”) Save me like a secret note and yes my unknown X you function, nothingness             you absence absolute, black box headlock of a girl if this is not a love poem, nothing is and so on, Q.E.D..