Radium

The moon rises together with the actuarial odds of one’s own death, with Vera Rubin’s breathing seeming to be heaving the night’s chemistry, she & her likewise allegedly slighted colleague Jocelyn Bell, apprehending & curating the heavens as if sublimated to a higher purpose, examining while being examined, moonless nights when chromosomes are bathed in radiancies of stars taunting the glow of big wishes, as cataracts are burned into lenses like hypotheses for what went wrong digging into things on this terrestrial ball of goo, this swirly marble shot into the spectrum of its charming skies, that flowered into chemical & alchemical processes / Egged on by mother science, macro- then micro- scopically, stuff of fetal emanations, fatal perturbations, seen in a lesioning cosmic wilderness as necks tip up & down, making accessible to the eyes the archetypal fire / The stars like tips of watch hands painted with luminescent uncertainties radio the hour in the cancerous night, when a shroud of impartial nitrogen darkens a colorless surface attempting remission / Ego decays along the lines of its half-lives, ‘life as we know it’ ransacks its own health, arriving at its secret tumors where it might lie down in a personal self-immolating hands-on sunset / Light & darkness tempt invisible laws & games of gamma rays, years & years of leaden opposition are appeased in sizzling intensity of trial & error / Under a body burden of ‘bad,’ ‘the good earth’ in alleged stability traps alpha waves like curiosities: always they wanted out, to question the soft vegetation / Developing mettle counters remnant quasar imbroglios, deadly interiors laden with energy & exploits smolder in decadence in the czar’s subject lands & minds / Wealth (prize shackled in elementary mystery) glows on wrists of aristocrats as they begin to dissolve into thin air where radicals are tested in immediate directives of what they are, challenges to a controlling synergy where prisms bleed the entropic hatreds & loves of the people / Heat scatters in its travels into fine discriminations of building material & concentrated infernos of nuclei, excavations beneath the surface reveal comforts offered to many, deeper down & farther out was a solid death begging interpretation as an inconvenient variable of life / Taped to Curie’s flammable arm, a piece of diabolic muteness? hidden healing powers of Madame Curie? an infinite mercy aglow? their love rationalizing the flames, the malignant & expanding vectors,  ‘on pourrait imaginer que tout l’espace est traversé constamment par les rayons’ / One could imagine that all space is constantly traversed by rays

Dave Shortt is a long-time writer from the USA whose work has appeared over the years in a number of online and print literary-type venues, including Sulfur Surrealist Jungle and Vital Sparks.  More of his poems can be found in Ekphrastic Review, Peculiar Mormyrid, Pangolin Review and Uut Poetry.