A golden shovel on Jorie Graham’s Fission,
            but also after Douglas Kearney, tbh

Spacetime changes now
beneath and to the
right of you, your theater’s
shroud of film, dead presidents, and skylight—
all sources of white, I mean, all sources of light—cosmology is
hushed, flayed, opened
silent before a new elementary birthing. And
this is the end of the thing we in adolescence called high noon.

a Black/black announcer, in Nike tracksuit and slides
is here to hypnotize you or read you in:
underneath the skylight-spotlight, I vouch for you, young poet. Watch
this: my mouth making meaning of you, despite your whiteness, as
if the discourse between dark matter and light were made of sound. It
seems my explanation of you overpowers
the fate the Black/black announcer pre-assigned you, so the
answer to the question I’ll ask next has turned electric.
you are read in, you are spared unminding lights.

over a dinner of cornbread, grease, and whiting
I prophet for you cosmologically the
schematic of the new elementary story:
new first fact of physics: first: the re-beginning: an “it” got “out”—
by which I mean one
Black man disappeared into dark matter. Later, The It Who Got Out,
          thought, “if even a layer
of my negative effulgence at its topmost shell were to tap light’s shoulder,
          might I not further
research into that strange cosmology whereby eg Emmitt Till?”

So Out went In: a catastrophe for spacetime. It’s
first principle holds the only just
-ice is perfect parity: a particle comes in, a
particle goes out. The It Who Got Out, come In with no exchange of
          death, leaves cosmology smoldering,
this walking corpse freaked with antimatter, this un-matter, this thing
          made of
dark has touched light:       catastrophe for grays:    apocalypse for whites:

© 2026 Christopher Leigh Silverberg