Kelly Jones

The Earth Doesn’t Know It’s a Planet

—after “The Sun Doesn’t Know It’s a Star” by Kelli Russell Agodon

We’ve been shooting penis-shaped rockets into space

so, I feel more poor than usual

and somewhere deep down in South Texas

things keep spinning. Someone is tending a garden,

their esperanza glowing bright and yellow against

dry sandy ground. Cacti are blooming,

thriving through drought. My mother-in-law

wants us to move down there. Tonight, on the news

I learned millions of dollars of fresh produce are rotting

in trailers while waiting to cross the border

and perhaps the best thing about space is that

it has no walls or laws or politicians

to argue about. I don’t have the heart

she wants me to have. I am angry

that down there, abortion is criminal and

everything is bigger – sometimes it is better

to not say the thing someone doesn’t want to hear.

Here our neighbors fly a Trump flag beside a jolly roger

but they blare 90s rock and sometimes they sing along

and it is almost beautiful. I don’t ever want

to go to space, but I want to go somewhere even though

everywhere I look I see a flood, a drought, a wildfire.

I love that I can hear the wasps in our fig tree

and feel the dry grass crunch beneath my sandals.

I hope that if we humans ever live on Mars

we’d start saying ‘the Mars,’

like how I sometimes say if I were the Earth,

I’d be trying to wipe out people, too.

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Statement of Homage 

Last winter, as the Omicron wave was subsiding and my dog was dying of cancer, I checked out Kelli Russell Agodon's Dialogues with Rising Tides from the library and quickly fell in love with the way she can write so beautifully about uglier things (environmental threats, death, politics, etc.) Her poems encouraged me to write more about the less pleasant events and things swirling around in my head, and one of those experiments in writing the bleakness out of my mind is this poem "The Earth Doesn't Know It's a Planet."

Kelli Russell Agodon

(from her website)

Kelli Russell Agodon (she/her) is the author of four collections of poems, including the award-winning Dialogues with Rising Tides, which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on the traditional land of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S'Klallam, and Suquamish people. She is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University's low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop.

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