Tamer Sa’id Mostafa | I Haven’t Been Keeping up on Pluto Much These Days

Tamer Said Mostafa (pronouns: he/him/his), a radical social worker by day and poet by night, is an always-proud Stockton, California native whose work has appeared in over twenty various journals and magazines such as Confrontation, Zone 3, and Freezeray among others. His chapbook, Which Way Will the Water Drag Our Bodies? was released in Spring, 2020 and is available through Monday Night Press. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing program at University of California, Davis where he won the Lois Ann Lattin Rosenberg Contest for Poetry. As an Arab-American Muslim, he experiences life through spirituality, community work, and the music of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony.

Also by Tamer Sa’id Mostafa: Which Way Will the Water Drag Our Bodies? Two Poems Poem At Ten Where Will I Find America?

July 2020

Tamer Sa’id Mostafa

I Haven’t Been Keeping up on Pluto Much These Days

— at the El Dorado County Community Observatory It happens that looking directly through a reflector becomes a tragedy once the constellations are unsettled on a night the air is fresh with pine heaped from the foothills. We praise the light years in the back of a sky theater with our heads resting on the concrete while the guides speak of the millennia to come. They say the earth is like a spinning top maintaining its momentum, only for so long before it forfeits inertia and recalibrates direction to another distance. I commemorate a moment in Mexico weeks earlier when I felt the axis wobble like a little jolt peeled the atmosphere from its reel and suspended the tides too reluctant to pull the land’s threads under their revolving onyx. Everything is nothing, but cyclical. I admit then, it is not new for me to hear them say Pluto is now a dwarf planet in the metaphor of star fields, rewriting itself to keep us guessing what variant will arrive next. But we can look at Saturn’s rings in the meantime tug their particles into submission and Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede overlapping the other’s mirage above the elevation’s forgiveness. All we’re left to wonder is Andromeda as ominous as the city’s penumbra below bulging from the farmland. Such mercilessness rousing our memories to ignore the gravity.

This poem was written to deconstruct time amidst the neoliberal control we subconsciously experience. The speaker centering themselves within the universe’s grandeur was meant to illustrate the anxiety of our existence when compared to the discursive, natural world. Yet, the sequence of spiritual inquiry juxtaposed against some sort of belonging, is its own truth.

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