I think of you, drinking Rioja wine

in that one perfect, protoplanetary night,

pure and unadulterated.

You lounged, celestial

on a cloud of noble gases,

until magnetic and electrified plasma

tore through universal darkness

to mould galaxies and quasars,

space debris and asteroids.

And you became all

spiralling, stellar arms,

a nascent Milky Way of hot flesh

around your insatiable black hole.

And I, a dense star, orbited you,

lost in your gravitational pull

till you made me bend

like the curvature of spacetime.

And my arching body

precessed in planes of motion

beneath an early sky that shook

with tension

as quantum spumes

circled ions of ring-beams

around a pristine sun,

and I was scorched

by your 100 million degrees.

A second before nuclear fusion,

you sang with the comet’s rarefied crooning,

hummed deep bass notes and harmonics

to charged particles

pirouetting on solar winds.

Heat drew a line

and you emitted those first luminosities

in fresh greens or excited carbon reds.

at all wavelengths to your Black Hole,

random molecules

like a swarm of bees against my hand.

Selina Whiteley (she/her) has been published in two books, “Up to Our Necks in It” and “The Kaleidoscope Chronicles” as well as in various magazines. Most recently, she was published in Literary Veganism and in The Lake. She will have two poems published in Neon Mariposa in May 2020.