XENOMORPH
by Mícheál McCann
That’s how I’m going to attack the audience; I’m going to attack them sexually. And I’m not going to go after the women in the audience, I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth, eggs down your throat: the whole number. — Dan O’Bannon
Needle-point appendages. A fore jaw that can break stone or bone. Acid reservoirs. A bladed tail to pierce a fleeing man. The progenitor smiles, imagining from the dark writing room. Content for his creation to tear leg from torso, implant larvae in digestive systems, kill indiscriminately.
*
On the bridge the reproduction begins. Some are lifted by their necks into ventilation shafts. Others cut down there and then. The inner mouth seems imp or troll-like before it crushes the skull. Scream, then gurgle, then grey matter. The darkening space station grows quiet. Floors slippery.
*
All is still, bar the gravely heartbeats of machines, and the one sustained note of a breeze through the mechanised vent systems. The whole number. Lighthouse-like, the slow fade then bright of the emergency lighting. The sleek and attractive musculature of this totally foreign thing. I am found eventually. It salivates.
*
The controller lowers. A sickish green acid colour coats the quiet room. The xenomorph’s echo location nodule whips its head upward to the mess hall. Ellen Ripley up there, and she is allowed passage. Its quarrel is the broad-armed men I recall from childhood, boys then, but cruel. Pre-programmed, it begins the final hunt. I struggle not to smile.
Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry. His work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Queering the Green, The New Frontier: Writing from the Irish Border and Poetry Ireland Review, and featured on BBC Radio 3 and RTE 1. Kei Miller named him one of ten unmissable emerging writers for the National Centre for Writing’s International Literature Showcase in 2021, and his second pamphlet of poems, Keeper, was published by fourteen publishing in 2022.