AC Edwards
Apparent Horizons
You bend the sunlight
you don’t devour
down your black singularity.
We don’t know where it travels
once it falls through your darkness.
Does each bent ray
erupt like a geyser
into an alternate universe?
Does each ray
genuflect in relief
as they escape your gravitational pull
into the unknown?
Or are they gathered like a bouquet of daffodils
just before the bride
throws that curled starlight to bridesmaids
gilded with an array of compressed carbon
and flecks of errant stardust?
We may never know your truth,
hidden in your grudging gravity.
_______________
A life-long sci-fi fan, AC Edwards is a member of the SFPA and was a juror for 2025 short poem category in the Rhsyling Anthology. She participates in poem-a-day challenges in April and November (through Robert Lee Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog). She’s had poems and essays published in The Gunpowder Review, the online journal Wordgathering, WNC Woman, BSFAN as well as Mermaid Dreams, a limited-edition chapbook from Blue Light Press. AC grew up in the Alaskan Bush, is a former massage therapist and has earned a black belt in karate.
Author’s Notes/Backstory: I’ve taken online writing workshops from Diane Frank and Blue Light Press off and on since 2012. It’s eight weeks of prompts and feedback, either-one-on one or in a group. I’ve done both but since I have time management issues, I often opt for the individual feedback option. The prompts for the week I wrote “Apparent Horizons” were:
…………..I’d make my bed there
…………..where I could see the moon
……………………“She” by Joseph Millar
and
…………..seeking wherever the light blooms
……………………“Vine” by Kim Stafford.
It’s never necessary to use the prompts but I often free-write (journal) on all of them just
to see where my initial instincts move my pen. I try to hand write my first drafts then
type them when I can, unless it’s for workshops like these when I type them as soon as
possible. I seem to not edit myself into a corner as often with a pen in my hand as
opposed to typing while attempting to be creative.
I’d recently reread Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. His book
started me thinking about astrophysics, science and space. I have often researched things
like black holes, rouge planets and wandering stars. I really wanted to do something
space related as an adult, but my mathematical and scientific bent was stymied by
chemistry and upper levels of math in college.
I started writing poetry after leaving my sister’s camera behind on the East Coast when I
returned to the Pacific NW in the 1990s. I found that I needed to do something creative
to combat the weather and SADS. A pen and paper were much cheaper than buying a
camera. Since I am fascinated by space, I often read articles which are sometimes
beyond my educational base. Notes I jot down help me understand and parse the articles
into language I can comprehend. This often ends up fermenting a poem or three. I’ve
used this process for years to describe science and other subjects in terms which make
sense to me. I’m glad if my non-linear and non-logical brain can produce something
beautiful in the process.
I’m almost equally left and right brain dominant and much more visually stimulated than
auditory, since I’m hard of hearing. During my journey down the event horizon rabbit
hole online, I stumbled across an image of a black hole haloed by a shimmering circle of
starlight. I kept returning to that image during the initial two-week process of writing
and revising “Apparent Horizons.”
I also tried to write as many space, solar system and speculative poems that could fit the
prompts offered in that eight-week workshop, no matter how loosely. As one of the
jurors for short poems for the 2025 Rhysling anthology, reading the offerings at the same
time I took the workshop in January and February 2025 may have influenced where my
imagination traveled.
In Kim Stafford’s prompt, the phrase “light blooms” had me thinking about light. My
mind went back to the image I’d seen showing the halo of light shimmering around the
edge of a black hole, and off I went. I ended up asking questions as if I was having a
conversation with a black hole, expressing a bit of frustration at the lack of information
we have about what happens to light rays, trapped by the gravitational pull of a black
hole. The word “blooms” made me think of flowers. An image of a bright yellow
bouquet in a bride’s hand popped into my mind, which led me to weddings. Ms. Frank
had me push and develop my initial and very general image of a bride throwing a
bouquet to “her guests” into the bridesmaids decked out in interstellar splendor the
second week I tinkered with the poem.
In the workshop we can, in lieu of writing a new poem, opt to send a revision of a one
instead. I did so with “Apparent Horizons” the next week because neither Ms. Frank nor
I were satisfied with the final stanza and image. I edited out five lines at her suggestion
over those two weeks. Right before I submitted it to Abyss & Apex, I edited out the final two lines because I couldn’t find the words to represent what I saw in my head, sort of
like how light you see streaming through a forest canopy doesn’t translate to film no
matter how hard you work in the darkroom to capture what prompted you to take the
photo in the first place. Yes, I’m that old school.
The word “bloom” has a special meaning because my late mother spent nearly 22 years
missing the flowers and greenery of Southern spring during the time she and our father
taught in the Alaskan Bush, mostly in areas with lots of brown tundra and pussy willow
bushes along the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers.
The first summer we moved back to the North Carolina foothills permanently, she
planted daffodils which still bloom 40 years later. Every spring when they flower, I think
of her. Since I credit my mom with my writing ability and my father with my
photographer’s eye, I wanted to tip my hat to her influence in a small way.
Editor’s Comments: I tried to find a free image of a field of daffodils under a starry night without success, but I thought about “light blooms” (too because one of my poetry collections ends with a hopeful poem with the that title, Disabled Monsters (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2015)). The abstract image (by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay) naturally followed.