MIRRORED

by Diana Morley

Astronomers studying the murky center of our Milky Way Galaxy have discovered something they never expected: a pair of young stars orbiting each other near the supermassive black hole that is our Galaxy’s dark heart. The observation—reported today in Nature Communications—comes as a surprise because astrophysicists had thought the black hole’s intense gravity would either rip the stars in such a pair apart or squash them together. But the new object, dubbed D9, shows that such a “binary” can survive, at least briefly, near the black hole, and it could help explain other mysterious objects in the vicinity.—Science, December 17, 2024

Black holes, 

viewed as enormous

greedy suckers 

in galaxy centers

swallowing gas, dust, 

anything coming

their way, and 

two stars just sighted

whipping around 

closer to the Milky Way’s 

own black hole 

than any seen before, 

testing laws of physics 

like teenagers

testing sass for the line

just under the nose 

of consequences.

Diana Morley publishes poetry online (The New Verse News, The Ravens Perch, and Exterminating Angel Press), and in County Lines, a literary journal. She's published a chapbook, poetry collection, documentary of photos and poems, and most receently, a short story.

HEART OF THE GALAXY

by Alejandro Escudé

The mystery at the heart of the Milky Way has finally been solved. This morning, at simultaneous press conferences around the world, the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) revealed the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It’s not the first picture of a black hole this collaboration has given us—that was the iconic image of M87*, which they revealed on April 10, 2019. But it’s the one they wanted most. Sagittarius A* is our own private supermassive black hole, the still point around which our galaxy revolves. —Scientific American, May 12, 2022.

It’s an engine, 

the scientists say,

a black Mustang

parked at the curb

in front of our house,

the Milky Way,

I’ve been there, 

lightless, eating up stars,

surrounded by fire

that cannot reach me,

speed of light,

the scientists say,

why the image is blurry

yet crisp

as can be,

such are the rules

we live by, the movie

inside the maelstrom,

the Papi

and the Mami,

a solitary mitt laying 

centerfield, a baseball 

tucked inside 

twirling 

as the cradle

of life in the universe spins 

26,000 light years away,

humans beings, Lucy

to the aliens, biological

Big Bang, Adam

and Eve to the bug-eyed

Greys

and the lizard man

who staggers out of an oval door

of a saucer-metallic

flying saucer,

time falling into time,

a spot on a boy’s foot,

beach tar, sound of waves,

salty air.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

GOOD MORNING, STAR

by Sally Zakariya

We greet you with awe, with wonder,

Earendel, Morning Star, farthest star

we humans have yet glimpsed 

through our roving lens in space,

older by far than ancient,

brighter and larger than our own

blazing sun, which bows

in deference to your greatness.

Gleaming blue in the galaxy Sunrise Arc,

you first shone your brilliant beams 

across a young and growing universe 

billions of years ago—light that reaches 

our eyes here on earth at last.

A single star? A cluster? Perhaps 

the black hole that survives

a dying star? Astronomers may

find out when they send a new, 

more powerful eye in the sky 

to plumb your stellar secrets.

What wonders they may discover.  

You hint at cosmic possibilities—

existence beyond our fathoming,

a reality beyond our earthly grasp,

life beyond life.

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her publications include Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed the poetry anthology Joys of the Table. She blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

HUNGER

by Rose Mary Boehm

I just read about it again, I saw

a video. Or two, or three.

TON 618 is the largest black hole in the known

universe and estimated at 66 billion solar masses…

these figures are beginning to be incomprehensible.

It’s hungry. About to gobble up whole worlds.

Is it hungry? Or is it just doing what black

holes do. A simple question of astrophysics.

 

I remember being hungry alright,

but that was about 80 years ago.

‘There is a war on, you know…’

 

The biggest black hole on this planet is hungry.

Is Putin just hungry or is it something that comes naturally,

a sickness that can’t be cured, a greed

that knows no satisfaction.

 

It seems as though my war was only yesterday.

And there, once more, tanks are rolling, fighter planes are strafing,

buildings are being bombed, whole families perish, the stench

of dead flesh under rubble will soon fill the streets.

The numbers again incomprehensible.

 

And—as in my memories—children will be looking for potato peels

thrown-away apple cores and sorrel in the field – if they make it that far.

We eat guineapigs in Peru—they say rats are acceptable. Siege food.

 

Another promise broken, another convoy

of refugees bombed.

I see old women on canvas bags and suitcases in the back

of trucks holding small children, the parents falling towards

the border, their feet working through the loamy earth

or tripping over ripped open asphalt.

Wasn’t there Kosovo? Syria? Afghanistan?

But so far away is almost incomprehensible.

The black hole has pulled us close. Pushing back,

will we be swallowed? Starving it, will it recede?

I am hungry for peace—or is this a thought too trite?

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and four poetry collections to date, her work has been widely published, for the great part in US online and print journals.

PRESENCE IN THE ABSENCE

by Mary K O'Melveny

Illustration by Andy Gilmore for The New York Times, October 4, 2018. Stephen Hawking said that particles that fall into a black hole “can’t just emerge when the black hole disappears.” Instead, “the particles that come out of a black hole seem to be completely random and bear no relation to what fell in. It appears that the information about what fell in is lost, apart from the total amount of mass and the amount of rotation. If determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either,”  Hawking said. “The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity. Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers, but they are clearly matters of science fact.” —NWO Report, April 24, 2016

Black holes have our attention
once again. We still know little
or nothing. They are consummate
known unknowns, as Rumsfeld once said.

An image haunts us as we guess
at portraits of bending space, our
breath catches mid-inhale, as we
ruminate on combustion.

Or collapse. I had a lover
once who made me feel I could do
both at the same time—plummet from
heat to nothingness in seconds.

How I gravitated to flame
and then to black ice still amazes
all these light years later even
when my days now rotate with sun.

Perhaps we are obsessed with past
lives when they become places of
no return. Where memories curve
inward, leave us to read between lines.

That is why we hunger for things
we don’t know or can’t remember.
Why, even though ignorance may
devour us, shadows of faith adhere.


Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press.

BLACK HOLES

by Rick Mullin

The Quantum Black Hole by John Baez

I liked the way they looked in my imagination.
Huge aortas in the midnight sky
devouring time and space and light,
demolishing the errant satellite.

I like subjective characterization
and not forever asking why.

But here comes a received and peer-reviewed design,
a doughnut over-lit and over-glazed.
The hole’s too small for all that stuff
and overall not black enough.

I liked the black holes more when they were mine,
when I was curious, confused and dazed.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

BLACK HOLE

by Sally Zakariya

Today (April 10), a global collaboration of more than 200 astronomers presented the first image of a directly-observed black hole. The picture of a glowing orange-yellow ring around a dark core, was compiled from observations by eight ground-based radio telescopes known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). —Live Science

Einstein dreamed them
far flung across the cosmos

Scientists to come had faith in them
believed in them, believed in the math
  that proved them

But until now only God could see them
their aura so bright a thousand suns blush
their pull so unimaginably great
their dark core so unfathomably deep
that to dare to submit to the immensity
to cross the impossible threshold
is to plunge to eternity


Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is the chapbook The Unknowable Mystery of Other People from The Poetry Box. She is also the author of Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table.