Escaping Fate
Do you remember when you told me that story
of all the Planets in the sky and how they all
had different jobs and had different people they
were in charge of? That Uranus was a magician
and he was friends with all the squirrels and mice
or that Neptune was a mystic and for half a dollar
he could tell me how I’d die and I said that I’d rather
save the half a dollar to buy a gumball and watch
the pink or blue or yellow orb roll down the runway
until it hit the metal door of the dispenser with a clink.
I remember you laughed at that. I remember that your
stories would shrink the miles and the hours down
into manageable parts until the eighteen hour road trip
ended in Des Moines and you said, exhausted,
Saturn was the bringer of Old Age but that you
hypothesized that if we stayed in the car and just
kept driving that Saturn would just get tired
and leave us alone so we packed up and took
the nearest exit for the Yukon Territory. You
looked beautiful then, basking in Saturn’s rage
and you still haven’t aged a damn day.
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