New Universes by Bradley Earle Hoge

2021 August | Utopia Science Fiction Magazine

On viewing Sam Francis’ “Around the Blues”
at the Tate Gallery London

No matter where you look. Into any spot of sky–
every dark corner–if you focus a telescope

on one blank space and leave the exposure
of your camera open long enough to collect the light

travelling toward us from the edges of the universe,
billions of light years on its journey, yet streaming

by just as fast as it started. If you collect enough
of those photons and store them in pixels, they grow

into galaxies and fill your field of view. Exposing
the empty space with color and brilliance. Move your gaze

to the next empty spot and wait. Wait until the night
sky crystallizes like marble from limestone on a canvas.

Knowing that you can zoom in on any single
pixel and see an entirely new universe.

​END

Originally published in the August 2021 issue of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.

Bradley Earle Hoge’s poetry appears in numerous anthologies and journals, most recently in Red Planet, Courtship of the Winds, Fleas on the Dog, Angry Old Man, Shanti Arts, Event Horizon, The Transnational, and upcoming in Fault Zone: Reverse. He has published four chapbooks, and his book Nebular Hypothesis was published by Cawing Crow Press in 2016.