From close encounters to first contact to space operas to UFO Earth visits, stories about aliens or extraterrestrials proliferate in our diverse cultures and communities. Aliens can take on many forms: humanoid, animal-like, plant-like, virus-like or completely divergent from species on Earth. They can be hive-minded or individualistic, coming from other worlds or dimensions. Their presence can be metaphors for migrations, conflict, cooperation, friendship, anxieties, the unknown, the familiar or obstacles. They can live in egalitarian societies or hierarchies of power. They can be serious and scary, as well as whimsical, expressive, cute, cordial or funny.

I’ve collected twenty-one wondrous poems transmitted from the clackety-clacking appendages of this species called poets on the topic of Aliens. These poems address extraterrestrial physiology/anatomy, communication, migration, reproduction, language and many aspects of conceived aliens’ cultural and social worlds. Aliens here are used as devices to refract the human experience in a multitude of ways, including as analogies for belonging and othering, estrangement and longing, humor and misunderstanding. Some of the poems are funny and almost flippantly campy. I really enjoyed including the humorous poetry because so much on alien rhetoric on Earth is full of kitsch, cheesy or corny (perhaps referencing literal cheese and corn!—like the moon being made of cheese… and crop circles and… is this why cattle are beamed up?) and made for entertainment. Yet, the topic of aliens, like their imagined anatomy, can be full of layers (like onions?—if we’re serving the food analogy here)—talking about aliens can be a potent way to delve into questions about our own role in the universe and our cosmology altogether. 

The concept of sentience undergirds profound questions of what intelligence means and looks like outside our own homeworld (Earth) and whether or not we could even physiologically comprehend “a reaching towards,” “a liaising” or a “melding” of minds, if the mind looks so entirely different from anything we’ve seen or experienced previously. It could be quite… well, alien! Not to mention, how strange and complex the biomes that populate their perceived worlds might be: the climates, terrain, ecosystems, flora and fauna, microbiology and networks. Is life carbon-based like ours? Or more… something else? There is much to disentangle! Or entangle in!

In my call for alien-themed poetry, I asked the following questions: What do the aliens look like? What do they do for fun, for work? What do they eat? What do they wear? What do they want? Why are they here? Why are we there—in their homeworlds or at some mutual location? The responses came into my starbox full and plenty—full of vast ideas about consumption, colonization, collaboration, collusion and convergence. There is much ado about metamorphosis, alienation and disaffection, but also interrelatedly kinship, connection and empathy. In this issue are poems about aliens parading as humans, aliens as completely alien to humans, humans parading as aliens, humans turning into aliens, brief encounters so evanescent that leave few witnesses, alien contact that transforms human understanding, aliens snubbing humans, aliens wanting to transform human physiology or aesthetics. Some have no humans in it at all or don’t reference humans. Some poems include visitors that don’t interfere much at all and leave with nothing more than a wink. And some, well, the remaining footprint is gargantuan, literally or perhaps figuratively, boundless and immeasurable. In this diverse collection, there are verses about smells, sounds, touch, words, sight, art, memories and more.

This issue of Eye to the Telescope about aliens is coming out, just as my debut sci-fi, first-contact novella ELLIPSES from Infinivox (set on an exoplanet) is being released, so it was a pleasure to curate this issue as my mind wraps around sentience in this universe in various projects that intersect in theme. I thoroughly enjoyed grappling with thoughts about intelligence, the cosmos and the place of humans in this great expanse.

Come contact these strange poems about these strange beings. Perhaps they are not so strange—perhaps they will resonate in some bone in you (in some undetermined MHz range). Or perhaps they are the strangest thing you will contact today (assuming you are not otherwise beamed up). Enjoy the intergalactic buffet of lyricism—come for the words and stay for the freewheeling fireworks in your brain.