SCIENTISTS RELEASED THE FIRST PICTURE OF A BLACK HOLE &
you can’t tell me space isn’t charismatic all gape & mystery / looking like a Jacobin pigeon hooded-coifed-&-stoled with light / a sucked ring-pop’s last nub that could last beautifully probably for years / I don’t know who invented fire but that being should be shitting themself right now seeing how far they’ve traveled unbroken in the flicked-mouthy language of flames / & whoever invented lust seeing how willing the stars are to greet unstarredness / isn’t that totally human of them / I stare at my palms & notice how dry-wrinkly they are / head line heart line bicuspid navel somethingsomething line idk! / juggling creases like the earth’s quilty skin / rock candy ebullient with stretch marks / tbh I want to love the world singularityly but we keep plunging our fingers into earth’s dessert & using up all the strawberries / I’ve chucked the good bell peppers bc they didn’t have an Instagay body / if I say the patterns of human hands look like puffed hotpink spine-buds of cacti could we be sustainable / admittedly I’m kinda jealous / people moan-babble about the photo quality but I can’t even maneuver my limbs correctly enough to take a good selfie / my confused eyeballs can’t see for shit more than four feet in front of my own literal face & someone somehow sweet-snagged this picture / & who hasn’t been called an unknowable blurry-blurry flaming asshole by the general public & also maybe myself / maybe if I rename the body Red Supergiant I could discover its potential / though I have to be honest here mostly I encourage my dying / tho part of me wants to hook myself to the sky like a hunger-fumbled bat / a too-large tooth shattered in time’s glossy bottom lip / I don’t trust the universe to keep me alive though I wouldn’t mind an extra month or two pending edits / even if it meant slamming all of gravity’s pop-rocks into my supergiant saliva-cave to jerry-rig collapse to make me into something unfuckwithable / we’re seeing it now / its blurry fire-song / a pupil so large in its dark I could put my finger in it like a ring
Dennison Ty Schultz (@clubdenni) is a queer poet and graduate of the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Their work has appeared in Foglifter, New Delta Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, Sycamore Review, and others, and it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets.