Image courtesy of NASA. https://unsplash.com/@nasa
kyle flemmer
stellar sequence
Stellar Nebulae
B ou n d in heav ing
Voids of fo rm , a
Sub tle shro ud — sub-
Mo lecule s in
Hydr o stasis . A
No ma ly ra l lies
Rem nant no vae —
In cites ig ni tio n .
Pro to stars car ve
Lucre tian s wer ve,
“A tur ning point—
Of light .
No thing now can sp oil
The fin ale , an or der
Bor n of origin.
Brown Dwarfs
“Twinkle—
Twinkle
Little substar—
Glowing sick
Magenta red—
Mourning
Futures—
Dashed by
Particles—
An errant
Translocation—
Some place
Dire—
Where
Doctors kill—
People who
Are people—
Nonetheless.”
Red Dwarfs
Revolution violent
As a bread riot,
As the butter
Of wartime
And bellies aching
For bacon.
No amount of flag-
Waving fills us.
Another democracy
Is decreed
In response to each
Terrorist act.
Today you will
Be called upon
To report your
Mother.
Become an agitator.
There are no
Clean hands, no
Innocent bystanders.
Just remember
Who has the right
“To words—
And when every
Poet is in exile,
Who stashed
The razors
—Hidden in our soles.”
Orange Dwarfs
Imagine a multitude of worlds
Lurking in the dark,
Idyllic astride un-ionized
Waves enriched with DNA.
They resonate in harmonies
Of mathematical precision.
One day we will walk hand
In hand, like children,
Over their abundant ground.
Until then, our fixation
Remains Ptolemaic. We
Make a science of all
That is wrong, forget quanta
Derived indirectly
“Are never confidently known.”
Estrangement is a virtue
Among xenophobes,
Those rude and wild people
Who think in pointed thrusts.
Facts fail or prevail
In their telling.
“I suspect a too-perfect world.”
Even in Arcadia there is
Treachery, abduction,
And a body catching bodies
Coming through the rye.
We live so we can learn
To regret pre-emptive strikes.
Yellow Dwarfs
On sunny battlegrounds
Opposing protons co-immolate—
Solar monks bellowing
“Let there be light!” as they
Collide. Material causation
Becomes religious preoccupation,
Fusion our respite
From the Kingdom of Darkness.
Ignorance blisters, but
Factions illumed cannot yet see
“How pride conceals cowardice.”
Words cleave matter
Into boxes of sound, and still
We are plasmic
Shrapnel of incendiary rounds.
Blue Giants
Giants’ fated death is chemical, might our
Petty dictator. We shrink or shed, choking
On the fumes of a looming detonation.
Scatter chromatic ash, oh unborn stars,
“Our death drive a birthright—
We fleeting zeppelins hang inflamed from
The firmament rafters, faithless balloons
Guzzling buoyant bowels, our skins rent by
Limited reactants as by the nails of harpies.
Light a match in this henge squeezed of
Blood and our failure will look like success.
Worldly possessions dispensed with,
We claim it is
—Because of love.”
Because love moved on, dishonor moved
In, or to part with guilt-spotted hands,
We take the orange tips off plastic rifles
And point them at cops. Release railings.
Swallow buckshot. Unseal our helmets
Before the Gates of the Maker.
It is better to burn on a pyre by design
Than fade under sail into a deeper blue.
Red Supergiants
One hundred thousand heads down
The slick pyramid steps, no sign
From God just yet, only this house
Fire of contested land, this linguicide
Standing dead-eyed in the bloody
Money, a shell of fusion consuming
Scarcity at its core. Hydrogen fuels
Ambitious destinies. To grow is to
Cannibalize our own. Rome also
Bloated in decline, a corpse king
Rat, red in tooth and famous. Never
Forget how the soldiers took aim
Over the heads of your enemies.
Now, incentivize the kill. We offer
Hit point multipliers and college
Scholarships for
—Running riot!”
“Fatality—
And an officer’s salary
If you can stay cool under pressure.
As oily-fingered bureaucrats
Draft their depositions, we deploy
In massive crimson waves our
Highwaymen and slavers, sent to
Plow your garden like Cunégonde.
Choose a heath to die on in this
Roiling supercell. Booted troops
Amass behind a border wall,
Awaiting the attrition. Already
Reporters are avoiding embassies
And stadiums. Already we jettison
The outer strata, mistaking margins
For machete silhouettes. So . . .
What’s a tontine among friends?
Yellow Hypergiants
They say great stars are quick to burn,
Great worth makes one unstable,
And fearless Ozymandias despaired:
“No power springs eternal.”
But, me? I’m supernumerary. A Sun
King rare and rarified.
Philanthropist. A luminary. Hear my name
At Clippers games.
I’m on the news, devoid of shame.
I’m on the flight logs
Reciting sonnets to my yacht, a tanka
To my rocket. Watch!
One mad tweet, my tankies dox
The offspring of my rivals.
Nepotistic patriarch of aquafers and fools,
A coked-up Dauphin
Going nut nut in the family pool.
I’m an Emerald City oligarch
Flipping condos by the billions.
Disaster bubble profiteer,
My bullion building to the ceiling.
I’m minting
Countless NFTs like a latter-day Croesus,
A diamond-handed Jesus
Holding Dogecoin FTW. I am liquid
Nebulosity, a human
Rights atrocity with enough cake
To end world hunger.
Instead, I sic senators on swing states,
Then contemplate decay.
Black Holes
Oh censored sovereign, oh Satan! Spur me to write what
I am afraid the future may read. Deliver the incantation
Which splits this poem, lend it your shape and purpose.
(Un)purpose: to (un)say, (un)make, (un)be. Dear Satan,
Who lies in deep Hell’s obscurity, hidden be thy name.
May warp’d waves lens the black dog b e y o n d
—An ’orizon of fallen suns.”
May end times come to countries without emigrants,
Their searing tongues lick obscene at the altar of ape
Familiars. Hail Satan, full of matter, pull me from the
Narrow sunbeam of my linear obligation, from this
Ethic of normative being. Take me into the confines
Of your love. Take space, take . . . time.
Take me into your most secret garden, for hemlock
Pales to the crush of adrenochrome as libertines
Burn the evidence. But how to know the essence
Without an outward sign? Consult a daimonion of
Fate or principle. Listen closely, it whispers
Hail Satan of radiant economy, God abhors
Your naked maw like the supermassive
Suck of an entry wound. Asymptotic
—A mnemonic without object.”
Oh, engine of annihilation!
Oh, Charon! Shuttle me
Down to bottomless
Perdition where
The whole is
Reduced
To a
.
Carbon Stars
Ruby rays run from a sackcloth hood,
Sooty and oxygen-bare.
Like clockwork, Justice dips her thumb.
It is willed, though we
Condemn you to we know not what.
Every villain stretches
For your alleged crimes. Would that
Lines between victims
Were clear. Confess to passing strange
While breathing in
Your neighbor’s carbon, its compression
Chamber heat-glow
Daily darkening your soul. Deprivation
Diagnosed, now,
Deviant, step around the puddle
Into righteous fusillade.
Make peace with your hour as divined
By peerless jury
When—
“Chalo!”
—The burnt umber afterimage
Transits panoptic nerve.
Witness hellfire convect in flesh, mercy
Rolled up into skull
As three megajoules of ablution
Sanctify the body’s temples.
White Dwarfs
Our first microsecond contains
The grain containing everything
Else. An expanding cloud of subatomic
Particles, condensing hydrogen densities
Collapsing into stars. Furnaces fed
By gravity, weighted with rings
Of cosmic debris precipitating
Planets like bubbles ’round a drain.
“Life exists on radiation,
We’re a solar fermentation—
Chlorophyll thieves defying entropic
Degradation of culture with Art,
Hegelian data miners inscribing poetic
Manifestations of Spirit in stone like
Roland beating his sword: brains spilling
From the ears while gripped on the wrist
By an angel. I am an old star imploding
In tearful pirouettes, called to here-
After by an excess energy, my true face
Hidden behind the cracked Grecian urn
Out of focus in the foreground. News is
White dwarfs are special, but we are all
—A little flicker of matter.”
Black Dwarfs
Ember-wasted
Awful twilight
Nearing final
Sunlit ruin.
Horizons ebb
“Like memory.”
After kinship—
Sputter, halt.
Protons melt.
The endless
Howling record
Spun out.