by Jim Zola
Alice and the Black Hole
At first she crawls, then falls
Down a deep well lined
With cupboards and shelves
On which she sees a jar
Of orange marmalade and empty
Tins of tea and biscuits,
Passes maps and pictures
Of nebulae and constellations
That hang on pegs, has no idea
What her latitude or longitude is
Since time isn’t what it appears,
For her size and shape
Keep changing: thin as a string,
Plump as a particle, she opens
And shuts like a telescope,
She leaves herself behind,
She meets herself coming,
Going, in between, near,
Far, crying a pool of tears
For the lost shut garden.
Alice Discovers Dark Matter
Matter doesn’t matter
In Rabbit’s hole. A fish
Or a frog may be a footman
In livery delivering
An invitation to croquet
With the Queen. A baby may be
A pig nursed by a Duchess
In an angry cook’s kitchen.
A cat may grin. It is
Not affected by too much
Pepper in the air.
Dark matter disappears
Into the hot soup.
A grin is all that remains.
Alice and the Butterfly Effect
There is Alice and then
There is Alice who exists
In phase space, in dream time
Of puppy barking and Alice
Running in the wood.
She wanders about and leaves
The puppy far behind.
She knows she must eat something
Before she can reach the right
Size and teach that puppy
Tricks or find the garden
To which she is strangely
Attracted like a butterfly
To nectar. How soon
Before these wings become chains?
How soon before these wings
Knock down the trees in the wood?
How soon before these wings
Cause tornadoes in Texas,
Blue northers in the Dakotas?
Alice Considers Spacetime at the Hatter’s Tea Party
Three sit at the table.
Alice makes four.
Alice doesn’t know why
A raven’s like a writing desk.
Neither does the Hatter.
Alice is annoyed and says
The Hatter should do better
With time than waste it
Asking riddles with no answers.
But time’s not it. It’s
A perfectly agreeable fellow
Sitting at the next place
On the table. And the next.
Time is always in motion
Around the table and never
Stops. As things get used up,
He moves on. So, too, Alice,
Nibbling her mushroom
So she can unlock the door
And step into the garden,
Cool, beautiful, bright.
Peter Huggins is the author of seven books of poems, including the forthcoming Small Mercies. He has also published three books of fiction for children; Trosclair and the Alligator appeared on the PBS show Between the Lions. A recipient of a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, he taught for thirty-one years in the English Department at Auburn University.
Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina.