I Caused Pluto’s Demotion
He may be King of the underworld,
but I am Queen
of the darkness within
that demands
attention: What will they do
with what they learn?
I have 557 earth-years of patience
around our sun, yet they balk how I can wait 9 hours
for her rays to blush my cheek –
this is why they’ve yet to find a way out of their binaries that bind them–
the Sun the Moon
the Center the Devotee
the Masculine the Feminine
–refusing to see the power
of pulling tides and seasons
so they make up categories and rules
for what is beyond
their rover’s reach:
transneptunian
ice is incompatible with life
everything has to be this or that
planet or not planet.
Then I showed up in my mottled pink and grey
a marvel floating through their tiny window
I became their new discovery:
First, they call me Xena (some guy liked the show).
When they realized I was larger than their god-planet,
they called me Eris,
as if they could arrange a marriage
between celestial beings,
as if they could assign my subservience.
I don’t care what they call me I delight
in their discord and strife
as they define and redefine what we are
as if Being is not enough.
Ever think we already had names, my moon and I in our fields of ice?
Like colonizers in the wild, wild west, they were quick
to claim us label us lawless,
as if
there is a wrong way to orbit a sun.
Author’s Note: My poem, “I CausedPluto’s Demotion,” is part of a chapbook, Planets Within, which I hope will be published soon. The poems in this book were inspired by the Intergalactic Chakra Retreat led by Christy Lynn Hicks and Bekah Finch held on Zoom in October 2020, which I guess we would now consider early in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Christy and Bekah took us on a journey through the chakras via corresponding planets. I combined my journal entries from the meditations with notes from the NASA.gov planet overview pages as I sought out a new project at my writer’s residency at Dorland Mountain Arts that November. I found the planets sort of dictating the poems, and the book became both an experiment in voice and a means for addressing the hubris of humanity we are witnessing during this global crisis. My writing is always a process of learning how to live better. These poems taught me how beautiful, precious, and tiny we are, and how only when we can liberate ourselves from our old stories can we begin to create the wild joy we crave. After I finished writing the poems for the seven chakra planets presented in the workshop, Earth and celestial bodies called out for their own poems. That is how I found Eris, and am grateful for her powerful poem that I had so much fun writing and now sharing.