I found Pluto in a bathroom stall

in a rundown bar in Dublin.

It was hard to look at her wane smile,

wan skin, the disfigured shape of her curves.

But she looked up at me, cool doze of her eyes,

and I saw the ice churn inside her

as she bared her hydrogen soaked veins

under creaking florescent lights.

She looked up at me and I could see

the red smear of blood down south,

the oozing core of hers,

the giving, giving, aching body of hers,

And I smiled.

Saturn wore lingerie for me,

lacey rings wrapping around

ammonia thighs as she sprawled

across her bronze bed in Budapest.

Outside, the moons danced along damp

cobblestones with men in black

and I turned her onto her back,

where I could see the hex-mark

nestled along her sharp shoulder blade.

Helium kisses along her neck,

Nothing pleased me

more than watching her gasp.

I met Mars sprawled in the fields,

his dark skin glistening with dust,

the sunflowers curled around him as he lay.

He told me he wasn’t a good farmer

in Cordoba, where he wished storms

to last centuries for him.

I took him by his talcum hands

and touched his iron tattoos,

feeling the divots of his spine and skin.

With his magnesium eyes crinkled,

we walked west.

Mercury left me in Paris.

He may have been an old man,

but his wrinkled hands nicked

the wallet from my pocket out in the daylight.

His sulfur lips pecked my cheek once,

just after telling me the names of his freckles,

the volcanic dents in his skin. “Poets,” he whispered.

The scruff of his beard felt like water on a burn.

All of it was rather nice, the tilt of his axis,

that was until he took my last twenty.

Venus would not speak to me for weeks

after I had mentioned his temper

and how his hands burned on my hips,

the pressure curling around my bones.

But I saw him in Copenhagen,

drinking his nitrogen espresso.

His face smoothed when he saw me,

but I could feel him simmering.

I had liked the feel of him, but maybe

he did not like the feel of me.

The water swirled the boats between us

when he looked away. Clouds painted

his skin opaque and I slipped back

into the afternoon crowd.

She lost her eye in a storm several years ago.

Once, Jupiter let me see the red gap

of her soul swirling around her skin.

A fishermen in her youth, she loved wind chasing,

but the helium went to her head

and she was left with hydrogenous bones,

too weak to move at all. She is okay with it now

that she is back in Naples, just wonderful.

But sometimes I see her crying from my window,

looking down upon her broken thighs

and I want to hold her.

She closes her ochre curtains and goes to bed.

Neptune liked to spin in roller rinks.

How she found one in Prague, I’m not sure,

but her methane kiss was dirty on my lips.

I sat on the edge of space, under disco lights,

and watched as her blue hair fanned around her,

ammonia laughs bursting from her.

We spent most of the night together,

but in the morning she went back to university

with her number tattooed to my tongue,

and her vision a wisp among dreams.

Uranus was a lonely boy on a train to Berlin,

whose hydrogen wrists I captured and held

above his ammonia head of light blue

before I took him in a dirty crystal stall.

He kept muttering about Miranda so

I bit his lip quiet and murmured him praise.

When we were done, he grumbled goodbye,

scowling on his way out, his trouser button broken.

I left Earth in Venice

for her hazy eyes and sodium tears,

were not mine to be seen.

We sat by the water's edge,

gondolas drifting by in the May warmth,

oxygen curling around us in slow tendrils.

Indigo stained my palms, mangos my lips,

she had shown me so much

beauty in our years together.

We talked about our parents

and how the sky tilts to our whims,

how tides brim with need, like us on Tuesdays.

We promised to meet again,

in either Barcelona or Liverpool,

but I wonder if I can,

meet her,

If I know the space stretched before me.