Timothy Donnelly’s “To the Alien”

Timothy Donnelly imagines the daunting task of encapsulating humanity’s woes, in a poem from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Timothy DonnellyOctober 6, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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To the Alien

What was that power that used to run through everything
and shake it till it looked blurry, but at the same time highlighted
in warm yellow, and full of a vibrance that calmed us down?

It left even workaday objects transfigured, and I remember
we stumbled onto the perfect word for it, but it’s been too long
since I last heard it spoken. It’s strange how things turn out!

I’m not saying I’m heartbroken, it’s more like I’m just dull,
and can’t be trusted anymore to hold up my half of the bargain,
not the way I used to. Not the way I did in my era of thinking

I was on the scent of something, when I’d run off like a beagle
into the darkness of my frolic, then crawl back later, baying
for love at the porch door, long ears covered in plump gray ticks.

Get them off me, get them off! I’m just kidding, they’re only
figurative now, which makes their removal easier to undertake,
but harder to verify whether you’ve done it completely right—

the rhetoric keeps slipping up and up, and wayward colonies
might be breeding in the folds, planting ideas that don’t belong
in the soil our forefathers swindled and built their fantasy on.

I played this game for a while, and on the message board
one teammate said to note what color necktie the tyrant wears
because he sends signals to us that way, but they didn’t say

what the different colors mean. So I imagined them waiting
in states of uncertainty, psychic need and undress, binge-eating
and online shopping in the marketplace that will stretch as far

as it has to, till a flood of feel-good chemical hits the instant
the tyrant appears in bright signature red, which has to stand for
carnal anger, fruit pie, desire you can’t stanch, and bloodshed.

But what’s that word we had for when weather gets so rough
it strips trees of leaves and scatters them in all directions, blowing
endless bits of debris into our faces? All we could do was watch

over one another, as a precaution—or at least we did upstairs.
What happened in the basement tells a different story, likewise
figurative, which is the only way the dig-out crew will ever

fathom us on a deeper level, one we can’t show any receipts for
but is instead the substrate of our day, communicated by way
of capillary action, like rising damp, or a neurotoxin that numbs

one’s sense of the possible. Which brings me to the personal
fantasy that fuels this lonesome paperwork, which is to say eons
from now, and near wit’s end, another human might make out

our late voice amid the rubble, excavate and embrace it as a fellow
crash survivor. Less emphasis on the rationale behind breakfast,
more on how black pepper, handpicked on the Malabar Coast

and cracked right here in America, speckles the gleaming yolk,
whose iron synchronizes with the mood of constant sinking
you can’t shake, deeper into the irreversible like a ship’s anchor.

In our federal iconography, the anchor stands for hope, but only
insofar as it touches the sea bottom. Otherwise, it just keeps falling
deeper into water where the light can’t reach, so bleak it’s giving

night without prayer, or bulletproof vests on the tyrant’s police
who only hasten the descent. It’s here my fantasy reveals a slight
tweak in plans, but with the lactic-acid certitude of a monkey

discerning the specific cry of her offspring from inside the ruckus.
She says it’s not for any human our hands keep kneading agony
into biscuits in the basement, but for the sake of some blue visitor

in from an elsewhere, the long committed digits of it stroking
crumbly documents for answers like an octopus as it wends
its way through our ancient tongue, adamant on fathoming how

the planet came to this. And how it felt to be adrift on feeling it
pirated from inside itself, and picked apart to profit the few
who have enough already, more than they will ever know

what to do with. And if the reader comes to breathe in traces
of the medium’s controlled substance, suspended with its lozenge-
shaped head facing downward like the coffee-colored mantis

at my window as I write this, its raptorial legs hooked into
the screen’s web of filaments, this porous wall of sense we set
between spaces to make it doable to communicate our data

across divides—and if it makes it this far in, bounded out to sea
by tides inside the body that fluctuate in answer to the gravity
of the world, which is itself a woven sort of thing—then I’ll say,

Hello, Alien. I have been waiting for you here, held on a stair
where an expanded sense of life kicks in, as when you meet
someone you are connected to, fatally, as you to me, or I to you,

so don’t mind any wobbliness. At first we grew from Earth
like a recurring thought, and then like a thought it couldn’t stop
having. Everyone sensed it. And when the thought of us took

up residence for good, it ran wild, and to the exclusion of all
other thoughts. Earth had it up to here. It said it would do anything
to be freed of it, anything to make it to stop. And one day, it did.

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Featured image: Henrique Alvim Corrêa, Illustration from La guerre des mondes by H. G. Wells, 1906, is in the public domain.