The Hidden Universe
by Kim Harvey
So we flew a camera
between Saturn
and its rings,
that 1,500-mile-wide gap,
mapping the possibility
of time travel.
The universe contains billions of
galaxies,
and in the space between them
astronomers have now found
half
of the missing matter
like glow-in-the-dark
string and nail art,
what was thought to be lost,
along the path to the
quasars,
the most remote
and lucent objects
in the cosmos;
with their spectra, their redshifts
they eclipse
the ancient galaxies
that contain them. We are
halos
of interstellar gas and dust
from which new stars
will one day be born, this
ordinary
matter that forms us,
the other half
still unseen.
About the Author
Kim Harvey is a queer SF Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. She is the 1st Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the 3rd Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. Twitter: @kimharveypoet. Web: www.kimharvey.net