Featured Poem II • December 2015
Jupiter Dis(mis)ed
J.C. Runolfson
You cooled too soon, that was always your problem no love ’em and leave ’em you had no time for love and lust flares without igniting. Oh your passions caught fire your rages stormed— so much of you to go around you claimed—until crunch time came. Then there was nothing but your swollen self heavy as any you kindled without the fuel to phoenix your way to stardom. Even Brother Pluto burned better than you a cold fire in distant rock to mark the end of the known. You just spin your intemperate way between Saturn and the light of success as though that makes you more than the world that would be sun.
J.C. Runolfson’s work has appeared in Mythic Delirium previously, as well as Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Stone Telling, and Not One of Us, among others. She loves stargazing and storytelling and the ways in which humans have long combined the two activities. She’s currently pursuing a degree in poetry and fiction, with side forays into history.
J.C. says the idea for this poem came to her when she heard the theory that Jupiter was a failed star. That, combined with her low opinion of the god Zeus, naturally led to a poem about the way both are so much hot air.
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