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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

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