A BURST OF SUNSHINE

by Karen Warinsky

Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a long-awaited milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory. That sparked public excitement as scientists have for decades talked about how fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy. The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction. —The New York Times, December 13, 2022. GIF via The Hustle.

A wave went round the world this week,

congratulations for tapping in to star power,

but others did it first,

blending us into something new,

their gravitational pull undeniable

as we crashed into orbits without consent

no way to resist such talent and charm,

and we were changed,

the way the sun’s gravity compresses hydrogen atoms,

fuses them into helium

the complete transformation

a burst of irrepressible energy;

we became light!

 

Ah, who can forget their first love?

Karen Warinsky  has published in various anthologies and literary magazines including the 2019 Mizmor Anthology. She is the author of Gold in Autumn (2020), Sunrise Ruby (2022), and is a previous finalist in the Montreal International Poetry Contest. She loves to kayak and organize poetry readings.

RE-THINKING BASIC DANCE STEPS

by Mary K O’Melveny

Lately, I have been thinking a lot

about dancing. Not actually doing it

myself – I was never very good at it –

but how I always imagined it must feel.

Like freedom. Like a grand escape.

Gravity left behind, shaking its weary head,

as I spin, turn, shimmy, spiral away

from heavy hearts, from memory’s drumbeat.

As if one might tap tap tap far away

from troubled minds to discover a brand

new stage where a leap of faith takes flight

on one’s own command. Where the only

things waiting in the wings like wallflowers

are lengthening shadows of regret.

 

Today, I crumpled up my privileged

dance card as I stared at photographs from

Kabul’s airport. It is impossible to fathom

the despair that sends one racing on foot

down airplane runways, clinging to wings

of jumbo jets as if they were old friends.

With each trip, slip, stumble, tumble to ground,

one sees how certainty of death also

means escape, albeit with less fanfare

than was craved in yesterday’s richer light.

Even as they strained for the upward lift,

those stranded, earth-bound crowds likely

knew how fickle dance partners can be, how

we must become our own choreographers.

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. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

KYUSHU RAIN

by Elizabeth Poreba




The Kuma River
churned in her bones
and rain became
a planetary
condition
gravity visible
as grey opacity,
swallowing
ceaselessly,
an event sealed
from any sense
of a time
outside its presence,
so that even
in the high room
above the storm
in her bones
anything safe,
any object —
carpet, dry sheets,
solid bed —became
a temporary
event.

A retired New York City high school English teacher and long-time resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Elizabeth Poreba’s poems have appeared in several journals, including Poetry East, Ducts, and Commonweal. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook The Family Calling. Wipf and Stock has published two collections of her work, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring.

REVERSE PHYSICS

by David Radavich

Cartoon by Drew Sheneman, September 21, 2017.

If millions lose their health
care, will anyone hear
in the forest
of the innocents?

Gravity will run upward
like a cyclone
sweeping all before it,

the apple will go skyborne
from the grass
into the golden leaves,

thousands will stand
outside the orbit
of hospitals, clinics, doctors,

the chemistry of addiction
will grow inward—
to arteries and minds
and communities of death

that whiten the wealthy
and whirl into space
all dignity and justice and love.

David Radavich's recent poetry collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Middle-East Mezze (2011), and The Countries We Live In (2014).  His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe. Much of his work deals with social justice issues.

REQUIEM FOR VESNA VULOVIC

by Devon Balwit

A Serbian woman who survived what was said to be a 10,000-metre (33,000ft) fall after a plane exploded in mid-air in 1972 has died aged 66. Vesna Vulović  (above in 1972 AP photo) was found dead by her friends in her apartment in Belgrade, Serbian state television reported. The cause of death was not immediately known. In January 1972 she was working as a flight attendant a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 plane when it blew up over the snowy mountain ranges of what was then Czechoslovakia. All of the other 27 passengers and crew on board died.Initially paralysed from the waist down, Vulović eventually made almost a full recovery and even returned to work for the airline in a desk job. She never regained memory of the accident or her rescue. She said in 2008 that she could only recall greeting passengers before takeoff from the airport in Denmark, and then waking up in hospital with her mother at her side. She went on to put her celebrity at the service of political causes, protesting against Slobodan Milošević’s rule in the 1990s and later campaigning for liberal forces in elections. —The Guardian, December 24, 2016

The nervous begged to sit beside her on planes,
figuring anyone who had plummeted 33,000 feet
and lived had lucky coiled into her DNA.  Her fall
made her a mosaic reassembled by doctors and
by will.  Changed by gravity, she spoke out,
unafraid to call a butcher’s hands blood-dipped,
even if it cost her job.  The tiniest stone can clog
an engine, resisting from where it’s hurled.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook Forms Most Marvelous forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems can be found in: Oyez, The Cincinnati Review, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, TheNewVerse.News, Noble Gas Quarterly, Timberline Review, Trailhead Magazine, Vector, and Permafrost.

WAVES

by Geoffrey A. Landis

"Cosmic Chirp From Black Holes Colliding Vindicates Einstein:" The sound of the collision from a billion light-years away is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. —NY Times, Feb. 11, 2016

Waves in space and time:
a billion light years away
black holes whirl and dance.


Geoffrey A. Landis is a scientist, a science fiction writer, and a poet. As a scientist, is a fellow of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, working on developing new concepts for space missions.  As a science fiction writer, he's written one novel and over fifty short stories, winning the Hugo and Nebula awards.  As a poet, he has written numerous poems, including this one.

THE EYE OF EARTH

by Martin Elster

Image source: NotThatKindofGirl

The eye of Earth peers, spellbound, through a chink
in melting pond ice, trying not to blink
into the blue enveloping its gaze.
It’s never seen the sun before, whose rays
scatter through the atmosphere, a link

to outer space, where constellations wink
their secrets. Billows take a healthy drink
of water vapor, amble past, amaze
    the eye of Earth.

Its habitat now teeters on the brink.
Though trees have bared their limbs, grooves black as ink
crisscross the leaf-strewn liquefying glaze,  
whose softening increases with the days.
The gravity of this, though, cannot sink
    the eye of Earth.


Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in such journals as Astropoetica, The Flea, The Martian Wave, The Rotary Dial, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. Martin’s poem, “Walking With the Birds and the Bones Through Fairview Cemetery” received first prize in the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014.

THE REPUBLICANS

by Martin Rocek

In Wile E. Coyote reality,
just look straight up if
you run off a cliff,
no need to heed science or gravity.

In Wile E. Coyote reality,
the stork only comes
to eager raped mums,
there's never unwanted gravidity.

In Wile E. Coyote reality,
if you're sick and can't pay
try the Tea Party way:
emergency room hospitality.

In Wile E. Coyote reality,
if God guides your path
there's no use for math,
the deficit's paid by divinity.

In Wile E. Coyote reality,
the poor pay the tax,
the rich just relax
and let Bain take care of their equity.

In Wile E. Coyote reality,
don't bother with truth
--it's a folly of youth--
the facts are a dull technicality.


Martin Rocek teaches and studies theoretical physics at Stony Brook University.