Supplanter’s* Sonnet, Astrology
blue light in the mirror, the moon, and you
let gloom gleam like rot heath mired into
blues prosody mimics usurper dew
clit klitschnass drips snot, sheath gyred in two
axonemes, porphine moths’s teeth sunk into
the sea between us, luminous light, spumes
smithereens, slurred ovaltine sunken through
oceans, endorphins those lizard entombs
opium tongue stunned on starless night blooms
bruise blue, conjuring typhoon and monsoon
swallows we two as infinite night looms
consuming flame blue licks at honeyed moon
in gloom—we wend through—blood moon—prophecy—
we bloom—vivisected—hope scorn’d—y’all’ll see—
*before the Lion’s Gate Portal August 8, 2021. New Moon in Leo. chaise SommerSonnen, the moon serves purple leather swivel chair of the summer sun like Monet Xchange in skin tight lemon bar. And it’s a fussy femme-y top like Monet Xchange or Fraiser or the Cowardly Lion. Eat your heart out. Feline professor daddy fantasy I remember Robin’s art history lectures those lion gate portals when you enter the nationstate barriers when you include yourself in the margins you might get devoured by a lion and after you are dead your decay will approach nothingness with reverence to match the orderly hiss of a match head consumed in flame my mind would drift to a million possibilities like that and when you’re quiet people assume you are paying attention in his classroom I distinctly remember the southern sound of his voice and the movement of his hands recounting archaeological adventures. He understood that I couldn’t focus or didn’t focus or focused differently because I haunted his office hours so he knew I could write and think deeply and comprehend widely (Dean Page called me a polymath) but choked on the exam unless I sat alone in a sensory deprived room and had half the day. I didn’t really understand it myself and wrote it off as test anxiety for years because black girls don’t have ADD or autism or whatever kinds of brains that allow for different possibilities, right? Anyway. I’ve always loved that in teachers, the ones that help you think and help you write and polish your boots and sharpen your knife, or claws or teeth against the boundaries of their skin, you know what I mean, it feels dangerous doesn’t it. And we’ve only just begun.
Audio: Sade LaNay reads “Supplanter’s Sonnet, Astrology”
Sade LaNay is a poet and multimedia artist from Houston, TX. They are the author of I love you and I’m not dead (Argos Books, 2020). Her poems are included in the Electric Gurlesque, Bettering American Poetry and Best American Experimental Poetry anthologies.
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