You wake up on Pluto and maybe
you’ve been here this whole time.
An exiled planet
for the exiled heart
calling home, calling home,
but your mother never picks up anymore.

What would you tell her anyway.
That you found love in a supposedly hopeless place,
drank tea with Hades in mugs made of
purple clay your aunt used to say
brought us all good luck.

Eventually, you usurp the throne
for yourself and your lover – mirrors of each other
sat facing the river of remembering,
nostalgia playing like the perfect
soundtrack for lack.

Everything here is either blue or red
bruises from lovemaking, hungry bodies awakening
away from eyes that named your love a crime. In letters
you spell the return address as
‘Whale’s Tail’ in light language, penned in darkness,

tongued with ancestors stuck in the ascendant.
You write forgiveness like wedding vows. Each time you die
your lover’s finger is on your clit and
you gasp alchemy into the air,
the season changing on the wrong planet.

In the red of nights, you knock on
singing bowls made of bones. The echoes get
looped into a conversation with Earth about trees
and shifting tectonic plates, the melting ice
shaking off mistakes.

The world is always noisy
in that old country.
But it never knows what to tell you
when you part your lips to say, “Mama,
it’s Persephone –
please

don’t forget me.”

 

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