Three Poems

 

 
 

Mogote

 

The Chilean

telescoped

Trappist system’s

rocky closeness

translates to seven

fellow planets

in a habitable,

orange-pink sky:

a lifting starkly,

sister-moons

transiting:

just envision

that size and looming

company

within the initial

data, that

dot of light

wavered, blipped,

anomalied,

in that obverse

way that detours

lead us to us

 

*

 

Sinkhole

 

Arecibo’s

radio

in the karst zone,

limestone-lush,

perfectly dug

is a bowl open

to all kinds of rain.

 

This rain, hard-dropped

yet unheavy—

escorted swiftly by

flora within—

stopped of a sudden

and roused the mists.

 

So fast

I felt I learned

the meaning of ghosts:

propelled by consumption

and need, hasty,

escaping the already

rapidity

of precipitation’s

finish, that

hatch undone,

series of equations

unleashed.

 

*

 

Monoceros

 

COROT 7-b, a lava-ocean Super Earth,

is the smallest exoplanet to have been

measured.

 

 

In Monoceros, COROT 7

-b and -c tuck quieter

than the constellation

among its kin. For these it has

chasing dogs, a set of twins,

a snake whose head

comes back as two,

and a massive bowhunter

who threatens all animals

on every planet.

 

So, Monoceros,

not only made for covering

distance, for speed,

is the solvent, purifier

of water with its wand so it’s potable

for other animals, of which

are we a kind?,

wielder

of a sword, a pen, the solute,

the burden;

extinction-canceler,

 

warrior, if there were to be just one.
 
 
 

Julia Leverone is a comparatist teaching Spanish and creative writing at UT Dallas. She has two chapbooks, the most recent of which won the 2016 Claudia Emerson Poetry Chapbook Award from JMWW. Her translations have been published in magazines including Witness and The Massachusetts Review, and her poems have been accepted or published in Sugar House Review, Posit, Cimarron Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She edits Sakura Review.