In the Halfway House on Pluto

the threadbare meadow is grazed by goats. Their fur is clotted with smoky chalk from one or five moons. The goats do not let me touch them: I am not of this place. Their forgotten sun has soaked my bones with light, and they were born burning cold. 

Pluto has no ocean that I recognize. There is a great mass of something fluid and alive, and it might be the sky. Things don’t end here the way they do. It’s hard to tell if something has stopped or slowed down, I don’t always wake up in the same bed.

Time visits the halfway house on Pluto. Time lets herself in; I pour us tea without sugar. She understands, she says. She leaves. She leaves. Sand drips down her face. It slips from her mouth mostly, when she talks, and from between her eyelashes when she blinks. You’ve been hidden from me, she says. She’ll see me next time. She has a way of understanding. I ask her if I will ever stop dying. She arrives.

Flowers preen quietly in the window boxes. Their petals sheen silver, and the halfway house on Pluto glows and hums with color. Everything else is indigo. Each petal is printed with a name I don’t recognize. Some of them are mine. Some of them are hers.

Wind spills through the open windows and out the back door. The halfway house on Pluto is not empty. Abandoned ice sculptures litter the halls. I hear soft hammering some nights, and in the morning, the sculptures’ not-faces are more complete, the earlobes softer, the blurry pupils calibrated into focus. They look somewhere I can’t follow. I hear soft hammering some nights.