My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nothing ______ Poem by Cam Stanley

when I was a kid we had 9 planets
(not 8)
and they floated single file to the right of the sun
(no orbits or gravity or laws of planetary motion)
and the sun was a big floating ball of fire in the sky
(no hydrogen or helium or fusion involved)
and the sky was blue because it was.

Mercury was a rock,
Venus was hot,
Earth was home,
Mars was red,
Jupiter was big,
Saturn had rings,
Uranus was sideways,
Neptune was blue,
And Pluto was small
and weird.

Now we know what happens to weird things—
to different things,
to unclassifiable things:

they get swept off the porch
and left alone to erode on the door
step of the solar system.
But they can still see Uranus.