Poetry by Marc Alan Di Martino

The silence of the oldest galaxy ever imaged, shattered
by pop-ups, “SUBSCRIBE!” buttons, ads for China Daily,
weight-loss videos & clickbait. I’m reading TIME and time
is what I have too little of, seated at this uncomfortable
old desk chair clicking scrolling through time. Dr. Who
comes serendipitously to mind. I once bought a poster
at a novelty shop for my niece’s bedroom which boasted:
“Time is like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.”
It’s a memorable quote because in the end what else is it
but what we can’t explain? My father standing in the hallway
explaining it to me, his copy of A Brief History of Time book-
marked with an index finger. But no human can really get
inside time’s head, undo its hold on us. Goya knew this,
of course. We are the nagging little thoughts and Kronos
our vanquisher. But back to TIME the magazine its view
of the heavens obscured by vexatious headlines. Neither
TIME nor time will ever outpace our hunger for distraction.
Before me floats a pixelated pearl 13.5 billion light years
away, the oldest galaxy yet observed, a modest blemish
of luminescence which astronomers can pinprick
with surgical precision, an infinitesimal splotch of blood
on the sclera
of the universe
winking back at us.

Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City Press, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Bad Lilies, Whale Road Review, Rattle and many other journals and anthologies. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.

Photo by Gigi on Unsplash