Sun in Leo, some three degrees:
a house cat threatening emulous starlings.

Moon perversely split with the centaur and goat-fish,
fob-watched Lorna Doone like glaucous ribs,
like rice in a wine sack passably peddled as
                          some folk Cymraeg rain stick:
breakneck breath of a burpling cryptid’s stomach
obscured in the greening clouds
like fumes from a Barbicide plant
due south of old Rose O’Neil’s golden Branson.

Mercury sulkily curled in that rose quartz conch
that a crackling piggy’s still stuck on:
those erudite eructations sperm whales weave
round hunch-backed Poseidon’s knees,
who carried the world in one woeful wail,
with Atlantis tacked with a rusty nail
to the plinth of a broken snow globe snagged
on buoying rolls of a charred sanatorium mail sack—

Venus between the twins: amanuensis
for fractured factoids flung like Ajax
glibly dissembling throes of a
spoondrift brushed down glittering eaves
of a duplex squatters were piercing the septum of

Mars at home with Ares, embarrassed:
a child refining from chivalrous trophies her sister scored,
among snickering litters of proxy wars their mother’d incensed,
a flaccid plastic cutlass beat against
Joanie’s gorgeous gorget cobbled from
playing cards and Julia Child’s
recipe cards
and greeting
cards and
cards left flattened, black, and red as Robespierre
                                            trumped in a tricks game.

Jupiter, but a degree beyond the bull’s hor—

What do you got their, Goldie? Goldie,

a wheat paste golem
sprawled out among newspaper clippings and passages plucked,
curled up into ickle and ticklish scrolls,
and dandled in sulfurous vinegar,

wadded up gods and planets a toddler scrawls
in wax across crumpling crepe paper;

sulkily nestles her baubles back in their tackle box.
It was a gift she’d intended to give herself come

morning, lucid as scars of stars in the
scurvied and scurrilous sky come midnight

bay to their smoldering hearts’ delights.