A Poet on the Edge of the Gates of Hell by John C. Mannone

After ‘The Thinker’ by Auguste Rodin

I sit on the brink of a wine glass,
the edge of a black hole, pondering
the wine-darkened ocean of spacetime
inside the event horizon of the black
abyss of my life.

I wonder if this is symbolic retribution
for past sins. There are always consequences.
The past churns with the present, and future
vaccinations against the deadly virulence
of grief are useless when contaminated
with yesterday.

I want to sing like Otis Redding if only
I didn’t have a care. I am sitting on the dock
of the bay where the river Styx has emptied
itself. In the maw of that thing, a burst
of light might be my only salvation—holy
scarlet to wash over me, flush all the pain
away, and spark a glow in the dark recesses
of my heart.

I sit on the brink of a wine glass
pressed to a sheet of paper, a white
hole waiting to be filled with crimson
ink—the passionate account of my
whispers and impressions on the page.

I write to know I am alive so that others
who read this might know they are too.
C.S. Lewis said something like that.
My words swirl out from a deep

vortex where nothing should escape.
How did that black hole form anyway
from where brightness used to be?

When I write those words, there’s fusion
until all the strength of iron diminishes, gives
way to collapse, as in that red supergiant star
in my psyche: a stellar explosion is inevitable.
But I remember that I am made from spoken
words gathered in that cosmic stardust.

I sit on the brink of a wine glass
sipping a French merlot with a long, supple
finish.

 

 

 

John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the SFPA Dwarf Stars Award (2020); was awarded an HWA Scholarship (2017), and a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature; and served as celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His full-length collections are Disabled Monsters (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2015), Flux Lines (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021), Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022), and Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. He’s a professor of physics & chemistry at Alice Lloyd College nestled in the beautiful southeastern Kentucky mountains.

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