John C. Mannone
Pearls in Galactic Oysters
Dredge the depths of black for sparkles in sands of space and time. Galaxies, as oysters, clump in clusters with glue of gravity. Pry them open; savor their secrets. Some are plump ellipticals, others seem to spiral out of saucer-like shells.
In slow motion of a million centuries, shells cartwheel and collide in stellar oceans, pushing against each other with tidal force. Streams of nutrients feed the hidden centers with stars and solar winds winding through silty shrouds. There, deposit their accretions, as a pearl, formed in sacrifice to the black abyss.
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John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the Dwarf Stars Award (2020); was awarded an HWA Scholarship (2017) and a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature; and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). He has five full-length collections, the latest, Dark Wind, Dark Water, a novella-length horror fiction collection, is forthcoming from Mind’s Eye Publishing. He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and Silver Blade. He’s a professor of physics teaching mathematics and creative writing in a Tennessee magnet high school.
http://jcmannone.wordpress.com
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Backstory, Editor’s Notes, and Image Credit: This resulted from my first exposure to a prose poem and prompt to write a non-lineated poem in under a hundred words. After I better understood that a prose poem is not a hybrid of poetry and prose or even poetic prose but rather in every way a poem without line breaks (the Robert Bly school of prose poetry), I grew to admire its strength. This poem first appeared in Astropoetica (Summer 2006) and served as an analogy for galactic astronomy. Massive black holes are likely present at the centers of all galaxies (at least no exceptions have been found). The Milky Way has one around four million times the mass of our sun. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image, which shows virtually all galaxies (https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/3886-Image), is overlaid on open oyster shells.
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