Dorsía Smith Silva

Dark Matter

They don’t really care about the black bodies that go missing,

Victoria Shaw / Teandah Slater / Areall Murchinson / 36.7%
64,000

snipped beyond the wind-dried dandelions. They’re not like
the loaded discovery of cool candy-cotton exoplanets.

There’s no NASA team to pinpoint their endnote existence on flash bang
satellites. Instead, they are throwaway slick monosyllables,

contorted algorithms, desperate silences that go hungry,
rainwater flecks succumbed to hardwired alleyways,

liquid names cast out in the undertows’ peripheries,
the runoff layer of things brimming in the permanent cages of TON 618.

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Dorsía Smith Silva is a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published in several journals and magazines in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, including Apple Valley Review, Portland Review, Mom Egg Review, Stoneboat, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, Moko Magazine and elsewhere. She is also the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and the co-editor of six books. She enjoys poetry by Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Rita Dove, and she is currently mastering the art of making rosemary bread and spiced carrot cake.