Pluto Is Not a Planet (Again)

by Carella Keil

She showed up unexpectedly at my doorstep one hot August day, hollow-cheeked and unwashed. Where had she been? We hadn’t talked in weeks, seen each other in months. The phone always rang to empty. She refused to open the door.

She must have been backpacking on the moon. But no, she’d done nothing so courageous or adventurous. Her journey was only comparable in its depth of loneliness.

. . . .

The sea is hungry and I’ve been fighting shadows all night. The muddy shore lunges at me as I stagger into tomorrow. There are magic fishhooks buried here, and I know not what they’ve caught.

"Would you like me to tell you?"

"Yes" I reply.

. . . .

Aliens bathe in stars, and poor children in dirty bath water. Dragons coil within fragile shells, dreaming of biting down the moon and playing catch with your sun.

On Neptune there are underwater forests, green as the Earth's heart. On Jupiter, we volcano dive and our veins begin to glow like iron in fire. The rings of Saturn are made of ice, shining like broken mirrors to the sky. I try skating but you let go of my arm, and I always fall.

. . . .

If you close the door, I’ll just open three more, so you might as well let me spend the night.

*Originally published in DASH (Issue 16)

BIO: Carella’s debut poetry collection, Undercover Butterfly, is available from Dark Thirty Poetry Publishing. Her work can be found online in Columbia Journal, BULL Lit Mag, Anti Heroin Chic and Peatsmoke Journal, among others. She is the 2023 Door is a Jar Writing Award winner in nonfiction and the Fall 2025 Cardinal Sins first-place award winner in fiction. She has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and is the featured artist for the Fall 2024 issue of Blue Earth Review. Her art appears on the covers of over a dozen literary journals. instagram.com/catalogue.of.dreams | x.com/catalogofdream