Hell Planet

If they tell us one side is lava hot enough to vaporize rocks, you can expect
the flip side is still cranking the big wheel of darkness. Magma will always
remind you of the best birthday cake you were ever baked with the herd of plastic horses
on it galloping across the chocolate field
and how some of the candles burned down to the horse bodies
and dripped the molten plastic all over your cake. It’s important at times like
the discovery of this Hell Planet to remember happening upon your high school crush
sandwiched between two bookshelves with his shirt off. Your young arousal, him
with his plaid boxers bunching over his running shorts, you
pretending this was a normal classroom where you had come
back to retrieve your normal
forgotten notebook. I’m thinking yearbooks are a capitalist tool
to monetize memory and you’re thinking I’m right. I wish we had known
about all those vaporizing minerals on the Hell Planet carried
by the raging winds to rain rocks into the lava oceans
instead of retaking school pictures with, and without the smile.
Would you wish for a rock tornado to have a good summer?
On your visit to the World’s Only Corn Palace, you can’t bring Frisbees or alcohol
so you replay the cross-country boys dancing in their red shorts last homecoming
again and again in your head. No wonder you never kissed a boy in high school,
stoppered up with too much wanting. You could make yourself squirm
from a daydream in AP US History but it only made you worried about leaving
a wet mark from between your shorts on the plastic chair. At least on the Hell Planet
shorts have become irrelevant and anyways, I’ve heard he’s a medical supply salesman now,
your high school crush. I’ve heard all planets start molten. Only lava planets show us how
we still can’t get out of the fire show.

Emmy Newman is a current MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, CALYX: A Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of Fugue.