recalled planet

In 2006, we removed it. Built giant fishhooks and extended them into the sky. Then we pulled this planet out of its rotation. Pluto was no longer part of the gang.

Did we humiliate it further when we called it “dwarf planet” or “minor”? Stripped its name and called it a number? 134340

On land, there is a woman. She twirls pens into her skin like inked ballerinas and calls her body this planet.

I weeped when they took Pluto away. Wore a large white pin against my breast for weeks, which declared:
BRING PLUTO BACK!

This woman who walks the earth has perforation plaguing her skin. She is a thunderstorm of beauty. She carries luggage in her pockets. A lifetime of wardrobe changes, notes, address adjustments, toiletries. When her hands dig into the corners of sewed hems, there is no certainty of what she might find.

see body as an arena of trauma victims
see body as a storm-watch warning in effect
see body as a parking ticket
see body as a paralyzed petal dropped to the ground from rooftop garden
see body as a fixed-gear bicycle
see body as an aroma of sewage and buffet grease
see body as this planet….evoked of power, pulled from rotation, stripped of history
see body as a dialogue between past and present with occasional interruptions from future

This woman walks across a bridge wearing black tar fabric over musculature/ This woman waters limbs so that they grow long enough to push Pluto back into its prominent spot, erases numbers and revises them back into a word/ Maybe she renames this planet/ Maybe she calls it by her name/ Maybe she glues thousands of maps together/ carving poems into the infrastructure of state lines and border crossings and/ calls it the formula of existence.