ASTROPASTORAL LITANY--
How simple to think of space as just another setting, a shining pasture, clean as Antiquity.
How simple to close an empty, marble eye on our celestial bodies and the names we give
them, the cruelty we speak upon them. We bind Io, Europa, and Ganymede to their
(selfsame) rapist for all eternity. We encircle Saturn with pieces of his own mutilated
body—rings of testicles cast into the black sea.
*
Before we can read the text, Chloë R. tells us, we must first read a weave of particles set
into motion:
We must read the thatch of Europa’s ice fissures, her patchwork of scars
carried across the sea by a girth of horns. The memory of a monstrous ring
piercing a drooling nose.
We must read Io’s shifting crust, the coronae erupting from her brow.
From above we must read Ganymede’s taut beauty, stretched like
diamonds of snakeskin over the bare ribs of his continent. To youth,
always, goes the prize of tearing, that seven-shouldered horror.
We must read the Jovian gravity well as rape. As the gadfly fever dream.
As the Bull. As an iron goblet—mass of talons and anal beads.
*
How simple to see space as something other than a cesspool.
How simple to say we’re sorry.
--FAGGOT INTERLUDE: VENUS LOVE, MEGATON SHOWER--
O Chadfonso, remember the time we were grab assing in the toxic rain? the night she
came to us: the irradiated swancat.
We knew she was for us—white feathers, green fur—and took her home.
Back at the blast site we’d fogged the windows in our hazmat suits, hardons stretching
loose lead. Before we met the cuntly swan, we rolled in the chartreuse mud and our suits
melted away. We decayed into the same pile of shit just like I’d dreamed about.
After hours we peeled apart, walked home looking like a couple of taints with a picnic
basket, and it started raining goats and moss and the swancat floated down to us from on
high.
That little cookie was ours. She clawed the shit out of our arms.
We had to let her out on the lake to float; it was simply her way. How we hated listening
to her scrap with the other swans, trumpeting her way across the water, but kept on
anyway. It was all we could do.
It’s times like this, when she’s migrated south for winter, I want you most.
Let’s go watch a bomb fall for old times’ sake. Fuck in the afterglow. Like the first time.
When I think about my body then, I am like one of those boys in porns, hairless except
for the tiniest swirl, just around the asshole. The hair is brown and completely straight.
My ass is round and I am very small.
It’s as close as I’ll get
to Debbie Harry as a boy,
to something carried into the desert, held sleeping under a quintillion suns, small enough
to be kept in the air while you slip in and out of me, sweet like a picnic, beautiful head,
love irradiated to a burst.
--ASTROPASTORAL DEVOTIONAL
Though you are far away and I cannot touch you, I hold old satellites to my ear and listen
for your breath—the roil of the kindest star.
When the space around you is darkest, I hold your light in the glass of my eye.
How simple to think of space as just another setting, a shining pasture, clean as Antiquity.
How simple to close an empty, marble eye on our celestial bodies and the names we give
them, the cruelty we speak upon them. We bind Io, Europa, and Ganymede to their
(selfsame) rapist for all eternity. We encircle Saturn with pieces of his own mutilated
body—rings of testicles cast into the black sea.
*
Before we can read the text, Chloë R. tells us, we must first read a weave of particles set
into motion:
We must read the thatch of Europa’s ice fissures, her patchwork of scars
carried across the sea by a girth of horns. The memory of a monstrous ring
piercing a drooling nose.
We must read Io’s shifting crust, the coronae erupting from her brow.
From above we must read Ganymede’s taut beauty, stretched like
diamonds of snakeskin over the bare ribs of his continent. To youth,
always, goes the prize of tearing, that seven-shouldered horror.
We must read the Jovian gravity well as rape. As the gadfly fever dream.
As the Bull. As an iron goblet—mass of talons and anal beads.
*
How simple to see space as something other than a cesspool.
How simple to say we’re sorry.
--FAGGOT INTERLUDE: VENUS LOVE, MEGATON SHOWER--
O Chadfonso, remember the time we were grab assing in the toxic rain? the night she
came to us: the irradiated swancat.
We knew she was for us—white feathers, green fur—and took her home.
Back at the blast site we’d fogged the windows in our hazmat suits, hardons stretching
loose lead. Before we met the cuntly swan, we rolled in the chartreuse mud and our suits
melted away. We decayed into the same pile of shit just like I’d dreamed about.
After hours we peeled apart, walked home looking like a couple of taints with a picnic
basket, and it started raining goats and moss and the swancat floated down to us from on
high.
That little cookie was ours. She clawed the shit out of our arms.
We had to let her out on the lake to float; it was simply her way. How we hated listening
to her scrap with the other swans, trumpeting her way across the water, but kept on
anyway. It was all we could do.
It’s times like this, when she’s migrated south for winter, I want you most.
Let’s go watch a bomb fall for old times’ sake. Fuck in the afterglow. Like the first time.
When I think about my body then, I am like one of those boys in porns, hairless except
for the tiniest swirl, just around the asshole. The hair is brown and completely straight.
My ass is round and I am very small.
It’s as close as I’ll get
to Debbie Harry as a boy,
to something carried into the desert, held sleeping under a quintillion suns, small enough
to be kept in the air while you slip in and out of me, sweet like a picnic, beautiful head,
love irradiated to a burst.
--ASTROPASTORAL DEVOTIONAL
Though you are far away and I cannot touch you, I hold old satellites to my ear and listen
for your breath—the roil of the kindest star.
When the space around you is darkest, I hold your light in the glass of my eye.