On Venus the atmosphere
rains hot sauce, Tapatio,
to be exact, and not only
is the hot sauce hot, but alive
and intelligent. Carl Sagan
predicted extraterrestrial
sentient hot sauce in the 70s
and the Soviets discovered it
with their Venera probe,
but kept it secret for fear
of the Americans developing
a secret hot sauce weapon
of mass destruction.
When it rains on Venus
you can hear the hot sauce
sing like liquid sky whales,
if you don’t dissolve
from spicy, sapient acid first.
Each drop has its own voice
and so the planet screams
a perpetual, demonic din
in a language unknowable
to carbon life. A language
unknowable, but tasty as hell.

Sean Lynch, he/him, is a poet and editor who lives in South Philadelphia. His fourth chapbook, On Violence, was published by Radical Paper Press in 2019. Poems have appeared in journals including Hobart, Poetry Quarterly, and After the Pause. He is the founding editor of Serotonin.