Melody Wilson

Singularity

And now we’ve photographed
the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. 

We don’t see the mystery itself—
any flashlight or candle we poke in 

vanishes, so we settle for images
of the place it is, or isn’t. 

The photo looks a little like everything else,
the ocular lens of a microscope, 

the nostril of a horse galloping at night.
They say it’s very still, that it gurgles, 

a baby practicing its vowels. When they say
it’s the exact size of Mercury’s orbit, 

I remember a poster of the solar system
on my second-grade classroom wall. 

Mercury, Venus, Earth, their routes
represented by ovals around the sun 

like the smoke rings my father blew.
I couldn’t leave him alone some afternoons. 

He came home dusty and tired
and sat down with a Muriel Air Tip 

and a beer. I’d wait till my mother looked away
then climb onto the arm of his chair. 

He’d take a sip, inhale, make a circle of his lips
and puff, puff—a string of rings whooshed 

into the air. What are smoke rings? I asked.
He wasn’t sure, puff. I speared one on my finger, 

but it just broke. He’d narrate the origins
of tumbleweeds, airplanes, avocados,

all before dark, and after dark the TV came on.
I search for him in the mirror now. 

He isn’t there, but if he was, I would ask,
What’s a black hole? He would slip the plastic filter 

between his lips, inhale, and I’m pretty sure he’d say,
when something’s gone, it’s really gone.

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Melody Wilson’s work appears in One, B O D Y, San Pedro River Review, Whale Road Review, Rust and Moth and many other publications. Her first collection was awarded the Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Review and will be released in 2026. A graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program, she lives in Oregon with her husband Phillip and their dog Z. Find more of her work at melodywilson.com.