Listen to Podcast Interview with Grace Cavalieri on The Poet and the Poem

The Sonnosphere
[Fragments of a Sci-Fi Space Epic]

Audio Reading of the Poem:



 1:   Galaxies everywhere. Dense and bright as pixels on a blank white screen.
 2:   On Earth it was an ordinary day of baseball, worship and television violence.
 3:   The Maluvians appeared to Rita in a fractal designed as a dream.
 5:   "Your weakness," spoke Goron, "is the space you allow for silence."
 8:  The Sonnosphere was an equation, a poem, and a book of the hidden.
13:   Mindstorms along the borders made the plot impossible to detect.
21:   Rita saw lines growing on a thin sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.
34:  "What? You thought this would be like an episode of your Star Trek?"
55:  "Earthlings," cried the one centimeter alien, "your words are inconsequential."
89:  The victims were forced to sing forever, having glimpsed the Sonnosphere.
144:  "They never knew of life," thought Goron, "not even a little."
233:  Rita's final aria brought even the blind eye Sun to molten yellow tears.
377:  As a machine planet the Earth found the solace it'd always sought.
610:  Beyond the solar winds the Maluvians looked back on a small blue dot.

First published in Olentangy Review, Winter, 2017.