Colleen Abel
Colleen Abel is the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow, her work has appeared in numerous venues including The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, West Branch, The Journal, Cimarron Review, Verse Daily, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares' blog, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from UW-Milwaukee and is currently the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College.
Anachronism
You carry nine planets in a watering can
We’ve explained about Pluto we even
watch a cartoon where the Big
Eight pariah their littlest
brother in a chorale of scowls
The planets sleep with us in the Big
Bed they bathe (Your book
tells you Saturn swollen with helium
would float in Earth water it does)
You say
You live on Earth your father
lives on Earth I live on Mars
and I feel it breathing the dust
of you crying for him at each
small hurt and sleeping your
head to his chest your feet
in my guts
These are new times:
Mother vestigial
At least when at last you
banish Pluto in secret
down the bathtub drain you wail after it