Leaving
I left the safety of your arms
for the vacuum of outer space.
I looked back to see you mouthing
like a fish. I couldn’t read your lips.
My blood did not boil but
seethed beneath the skin.
My hands swelled, filling
the space left by yours.
I stared into the sun.
The last thing I remember, tears
were simmering in my eyes,
your name frozen on my tongue.
Karen Dennison
From Counting Rain (Indigo Dreams)
Event Horizon
Untouched for months, your non-slip ruler
measures empty space. On the cutting mat,
a bone-folder remembers your index finger,
thumb, push of your palm. Dust has fallen unseen
on handmade maquettes, on the polished sheen
of the angle-poise lamp. Its moon of light hovers
over an empty pamphlet, casts a blade and a lip
of shadow from the knot and thread of its stitched spine.
Tracing-paper pages show hairline cracks
in their creases. In-between, the arthritic limbs
of a Photoshopped tree glow like a bone x-ray.
Your desk is flecked with gold paint.
I think of the traces of gold in our bodies, how all the gold
on earth was forged by stars; how you read that its glitter
is caused by the speed of electrons in its orbit,
the relative slowing of their time;
and of the crazy idea you had
that the point of death was like falling into
a black hole’s event horizon, where you could cram
a lifetime of thought into a second.
From The Paper House (Hedgehog Poetry) and first published in Under the Radar Magazine.
Image from NASA website.
At Point Nemo
At the height of youth, I circled earth.
It spun at my feet, a distant beauty;
admirers attracted into graveyard orbits.
For me the sun was another star
and though I learnt its physics,
I worshipped it as Ra, studied its secrets.
I was unbreakable and made of light
and time was for other people. I witnessed
the fall of peace – Mir breaking up
on re-entry with smoking hands and fireball-
fingertips, crashing into the South Pacific.
My own descent into waves was sudden,
knocked off course by junk and debris.
For decades I lay on the seabed
with other wrecks and remnants of life.
Diving down through miles of water,
you swam into the sunken city of my heart,
emptied my drowned mouth. I listened
to your stories of the surface, began to believe
in rebirth, in escaping gravity’s grip on my bones;
felt like I was back in high orbit. But you left
how you arrived ― a lone explorer on a mission,
fearless. And every night is terminal velocity,
nothing but the cemetery to break my fall.
Karen Dennison
“Point Nemo” (oceanic pole of inaccessibility) is the area of ocean
furthest from land and is the location of the so-called Spacecraft
Cemetery where retired spacecraft are sent
From Of Hearts, published by Broken Sleep Books. First published in Riggwelter.
Featured image ©strelkamag.com – “cemetery of spaceships” found in point Nemo
After you’re gone
I scour dead light,
coded impulses hurtling
through blood-dark space;
island suns that broadcast
their lonely semaphore.
My heart’s a pulsar
sweeping the night,
warm breath on cold glass
condensing to gas clouds,
constellations.
I search until
the stars switch off
and the shore of sky
weathers your bones to dust
Karen Dennison
From Of Hearts, published by Broken Sleep Books. First published in erbacce.
Featured image from NASA website
Bedrock
At the window, light bounces
off me, journeys to glass.
Most passes through this solid pane,
tunnels away into night.
You can’t predict which photons
will reflect. There is only probability.
The five percent I see looking back
ghost the window with the shell of my face.
Our bedrock is not rock at all
but shifting sands, particles that slip
in and out of space, find themselves
in different places at the same time.
I think how no-one is ever truly seen,
how what we know is a surface
of a surface of a surface.
Karen Dennison
First published in 14 Magazine
Imagine chasing a beam of light
Imagine life as an impression
in four dimensions where time
is space, where an image
of each moment is held
forever in its place.
Imagine the traces each person
would make, human-shaped
hollows, tunnels that meet
and split and stop; and never fade.
Imagine the sky embroidered
with bird-shaped loops,
each fanning of each wing caught;
the sun a pulsing streamer
of endless figures of eight.
Karen Dennison
First published in Popshot and also in Shoreline of Infinity.
Featured image by Anthony Ayiomamitis from http://solar-center.stanford.edu/art/analemma.html
This is the third time that Elly Nobbs and I have given each other images to respond to. It’s a great way to inspire new writing.
Photograph by Karen Dennison
Scene Noir — The Protector
The shadow by my elbow
says, Never mind. A gun hides
under wrapping paper.
It’s up to me to use,
thus saving
all the other party goers.
They have no clue.
I grip the thing, contemplate
its heaviness; hide
it behind, in the waistband
of my jeans like the FBI
agents do on Netflix.
Resigned that the plot calls
for this protagonist
to shoot her mouth off, roaring
— Let’s be done with it!
E.E. Nobbs
Photo by Elly Nobbs (Kodak Instamatic 1978)
I asked Elly about the story behind this photo. In the 1960s her parents bought the adjoining small farm which had belonged to an ancient brother and sister. The barn was full of stuff of all sorts – old magazines etc…nothing ever thrown out. As it was gradually falling down it became dangerous so in 1978 Elly’s parents had the Fire Department come and burn down the barn.
Old Flames
He piled up her letters to him,
together with photographs, favourite novels,
diaries he’d penned, poured on lighter fluid.
How she and he melted in Rome and Paris,
fluttered like moths into the night, flames twisting
into ghosts, exorcised as smoke; words re-written as ash,
while the crackling edifice collapsed.
Years later, loss hits him like sunlight
through magnifying glass
onto the crumpled sheets of paper
where he’s written his heart.
What he would give to go back,
unstrike the match, save one photo,
frame the face he can no longer picture.
Karen Dennison
Karen Dennison 