Backwaters press, 2023, 98 pp.
Longing as Dark Matter
The most rending most revealing most propelling substance, driving us
with sugared whip of desire and the astronomers say
this lack makes up the vast majority of matter or matters
in the universe and I think
they must know
how to send instruments into space to track it they must know
how to isolate the absence which pulsates in bones aching
for what they need or think they need in the marrow which sucks
everything out of orbit. The astronomers know how to extract
information from astrophysical objects make them spill the truth
detect proof in the way the stars sway in unison, in the way
the universe bows and bends aside to allow for the ghost of it to pass;
we can measure the gravitational effects
on surrounding matter on blood vessels pupils airways
pulse rates tear ducts we can observe it
slashing a hole right through—
astronomers stalk their prey covetously track the prints of its wild
and ruthless ricocheting. It has been searched for intensely
and never seized only the tell-tale damage left behind in the wakes
ripped in constellations, the unseeable fault-lines in the soul keening
the shrill want to know to touch to have. But so invisibly
it pierces the fabric of being with an arrow that is phantasm of fire
thrusting fire into fire that already burns slow in the lamp of every star.
Kepler Supernova Remnant
Maybe the remnant tells the whole
story. Maybe the shattering says the one-
ing and we just can’t see the we
in its visible form, the unleashed dazzle of matter
not debris but a new creation, what remains
—our cinders, come together—
burning through time and space:
complete, even as the fusion
rives and gnarls the universe and appears
to be expulsion from self. The astronomers trace
the cataclysmic losing of matter into space, knot
by knot, body by body and we know something
about vast collapse that ignites expansion
even here, even in the fragile
mass of the animal heart which must
fissure in order to love.
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Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming October 2023), winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Scientific American, Verse Daily, RHINO, America Magazine, Connecticut River Review, Lily Poetry Review, EcoTheo Review, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere.
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