We ask our judges to award four equal fourth prizes each year. Here, Catalogue of Black Holes by Alicia Sometimes.
Alicia is a poet, artist and broadcaster. She has performed her poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems and many more. She is director/co-writer of art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. She has held residencies at KSP Writers’ Centre, Varuna, Melbourne Aquarium, Boyd Garret and a virtual residency for the Manchester Literature Festival. In 2023 she received ANAT’s Synapse Artist Residency and co-created an art installation for Science Gallery Melbourne’s exhibition, Dark Matters. Her latest book is Stellar Atmospheres. @aliciasometimes
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Catalogue of Black Holes
My left breast has imprints of cancer
gloomy traces of mass, charge and spin
each mark, composed of stark nothings
instabilities, where information has not
yet escaped. This stellar collapse, space
demarcations where time is motionless
flat stamps of a map, vortices of havoc
accretions invisible, absent of vestiges
My body becomes nebulae, shiver-light
an acute dissimulation of other objects
particle-fire, trying to expose vacuity
— dense regions of galactic tissue
These malignancies are drawing pins
central points on a planisphere, starwheels
of misfortune. Past and future
squash and squeeze, heavy deflections
how I re-interpret every constraint
how I yield to the singularity of hope
The larger and heftier a black hole is —
the faster it grows. My lava skin peeling
after rounds of radiation, arms trembling
as I visualise evaporation, relic reduction
If anything crosses the event horizon
it is lost forever. Such impermanency —
gravitational attractions of equal value
luminous cores of dazzling existence
a reminder to rejoice: overtly, distinctly
— yearning to be finally observed
our moonless delineations are present
as all limitations, shrink then dissolve
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Kit Fan, our competition judge, commented on this poem as follows:
The poem handles the terrifying bodily transformation with a calm, investigative distance which heightens its poignancy. The absence of full-stops is subtly executed, enabling the poem’s interchanges in scale from skin to universe.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 