The True Miss Universe Contest

by Allan Appel

What if Miss Holland were not a stroopwafel

Miss Belize not a jaguar trailing jungle vegetation

Or Miss Ukraine not an archangel with sixteen-foot wings

And Miss USA not a glittery moon landing

What if they were physicists, beautiful Ph.Ds all

Modeling their latest research finds,

Miss Holland as a parallel universe

Would appear as a slice in the loaf of Time

Miss Belize in an intensely dark leotard

And flaming wings define her expertise in black holes

Miss Ukraine, a top mind in star formation,

Struts her dazzling stellar stuff

And Miss USA, the pride of M.I.T.’s anti-gravity dept.

Enters walking entirely on her hands,

The stilettos high above are antennae

Aimed into limitless space symbolizing

The never-ending search for extra-terrestrial life

We are likely not alone, but perhaps we should be.

Allan Appel is a long-time novelist, with about nine published including a National Jewish Book Award finalist way back when and a Barnes and Noble Disvover Great New Writers awardee, High Holiday Sutra (Coffee House Press, 2001). However, he began as a poet years before. When the pandemic struck the editor at the newspaper where he’s worked for twenty years, The New Haven Independent, anointed me their “pandemic poet,” with a mandate to chuck out one poem a week to capture the pandemic experience or some such or whatever else popped into mind. Some of the poems appearing here in Yellow Mama emerged from that experience.