by Claire Kelly
Can’t turn away. The TV emitting
a pulse of similes to shrink down
the unfathomable into some smidgen.
Supersized black holes, one at the centre
of each galaxy. These compressed everythings,
heavy nothings beyond comprehension.
The black holes slurp back,
like they’re bingeing noodles
after the paramount wake ’n bake of their lives.
Black holes have a stage of pure consumption
like a 12-year-old on Halloween
who knows this is the last for-fun,
ghoul-begging for neighbourly candy.
The black holes shoot out what they can’t take in,
their trail is both circular and
like a spear bisecting a torso,
like a ginormous, double-bladed
lightsaber glitching, sputtering out
billions of tonnes of gas. But also
like blood gushing and pooling
where the wound isn’t cauterized.
Here stars cannot form.
There’s a close-up of tub water
coiling down the drain.
They show a tornado
then level up to a hurricane.
Bluster begets bluster, and the scale
they want to express expands too quickly.
No human scale works here.
At one point they CGI-stretch a human out
like a noodle. They even say
like a noodle, after she slipped past
the event horizon, though I don’t think slipped past
is right, should be spilled into,
like the moment you know you’re falling —
and there’s no way to keep upright.
But that cusp-moment chugging on
for a human-span infinity, perhaps even close
to a geological one, before the cosmic stretching,
before a final rending.
Compression too great for comparison.
— from Juniper Volume 2, Issue 1