Most nights,
you can outstretch your arm
and your thumb would blot out our moon.
Pluto’s Charon is so big and close
it would take your whole fist.
A love letter, of sorts.
It has been a rough few years for Pluto. For nearly eight decades, she was a mysterious fleck at the edge of our solar system. Then, suddenly, she was demoted.
Through 20 poems about Pluto and her “motley crew of underworld moons,” Planet-ish explores marriage, grief, and feminism through the guise of the gravitational forces that keep us together.
Behind the book
Author Lyndal Cairns (she/her) is a poet based in the Pacific Northwest who writes about science and the environment. Her work has been featured in The Adriatic, Consilience, Aurora Journal, Wordstorm, Beast Crawl, Australian Poetry, and others. Connect with her on Twitter.
Many of the poems that became Planet-ish were written as part of the poem-a-day challenge in the Ninja Poets writers’ collective.
Planet-ish
Nothing changed for Pluto.
She threw no tantrums
and lodged no appeal.
Quietly, coolly, she accepted her demotion
but nothing changed for her.
Wedded to a star system that no longer recognizes her,
though she never turned her face away.
She waits 248 years to get as close
as the farthest thing from here.
Planet-ish 