Dwarf Planet by Laura Ingram

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

My mother’s milk is space dust, its own element. 

I suckle mercury, and it makes me into an alien.

I speak a language nobody knows 

and never grow up. 

After the nightmare, my hand over my heart. 

In the dark, I mistake my own 

arms for Saturn’s rings.

Outside the window glass, 

star-spat cloud buds into bright flower, 

petals blue as Earth.

I ellipse the black garden like Pluto,

harvest Hiroshima ash into my apron. 

The grasses whispering their griefs to my ankles

as if they could fell me like a fawn 

take me out of the trap and make me their god.  

Maybe I could make it rain all the time. 

I use the water as a mirror, 

comb the uranium out of my hair. 

I would like to believe in tenderness.

The moon is no one’s wife—

she is a white-knuckle, an empty hand. 

The moon is a fist. 

There’s radon in the well water.

It has already killed a calf

and wasted my body. 

Bedridden with War,

the sun, that hairy lioness, catches my fevers. 

Or moon is my death mask. I know her name. 

She throws the sea over her shoulder like salt,

pockets an infant’s caul in her night gown.  

There is no loneliness like longing.

Every constellation as an effigy,

candle-lit by nebulas, 

all distant as saints. 

Every face you see in a dream is a face you’ve seen before.

Laura Ingram is a young poet who lives and writes in rural Virginia. Her work has previously appeared in over one-hundred literary magazines and journals, among them Juked and Apple in the Dark. Laura is the author of six collections of poetry; The Taffeta Parable, Junior Citizen's Discount, Mirabilis, Animal Sentinel, The Ghost Gospels, and the Solitude of the Female Preying Mantis. Laura enjoys most books and all cats.