Invisible Woman Quits Fantastic Four

Her life’s a comic book.

Every month some megalomaniac in spandex
and a cape shows up to rule the world.

She’s sick of fighting forty-story monsters named

Annihilus              Galactus          Fin Fang Foom

She decides to be an angel.

Leaves a note by the toaster, knowing Reed
will need its heat to see her invisible words,

remembering love letters penned in lemon juice
before cosmic rays aborted their orbit,

that fateful flight reducing them to adjectives:

Mr. Fantastic                           The Thing

Human Torch                          Invisible Woman

Shedding sea-blue spandex, an August breeze
stiffens her nipples. She turns invisible and leaves

to whisper what’s your power?

in the ears of passing strangers.









Michael Kriesel won North American Review’s 2015 Hearst Prize. Past President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, his books include Whale of Stars and Moths Mail the House.