My Mercury

by Shannon

I called her Mercury, that summer day in June
when I noticed her for the first time. She slid
past my house on her scratched up taped up
roller-blades like a silvery jet of fluid and waved
hi to me as she cut clean through the butter-thick
air. I swam in her chrysanthemum yellow peppered
with sapphire dust floating on a rippling pond eyes
when they met my own boring brown ones, framed by
thick black raven hair that danced in the air like
so many threads of spider’s silk. I never talked to that
girl, not even when the moving trucks swallowed her
boxes and furniture and eventually even herself whole,
‘cause I was just a shy little thing who hid behind
the asteroid belt of my mom’s plaid curtains
and sometimes peeped out to warm up a little
in her far-off brilliance. ‘Cause she was the light
of my universe and I was a black orb ostracized by
the earth’s learned men as a superfluous addition to the
Elite Eight. They think they know everything,
but they don’t know this; the sun isn’t the center of our
solar system¾she is. And even when Mercury moved
away I still hid behind that asteroid belt, even though the
orbital sometimes pushed me in front to bask in her distant
glow. She wrapped me up tight in her quicksilver smile
whenever she caught a glimpse of me,
and pulled me, Pluto, back into the Milky Way.