Black Hole Facts

Poetry | Sage Agee

If you were to travel to the black hole in the middle of our galaxy 

it would take twenty-six years of your life. 

During that time, two thousand and six hundred years 

would pass on earth. A blink is a lifetime, sometimes. 

We were just sitting

on the mattress on the floor

of your basement apartment

with no windows listening 

to Frank Ocean like we’d scouted him and made him

famous. Your spliff ratio was 60/40 tobacco to weed 

but I inhaled it like it was 20/80—

our lungs spaceship modules back then. 

the night you wrote your thesis,

which is to say you wrote your entire thesis in one night,

I slept on your shins 

played cat’s cradle with your leg hairs. 

We bought a van together two months in

I put the loan in my name, you sold your truck to pay for it. 

The dogs flexed their bellies on sleeping bags in the back as we drove 

You adopted an old dog 

just to get me to notice you;

I can’t believe it worked. 

We decided to get married nine months in

proposed to each other in a Carl’s Junior parking lot. 

On September 9th, we gave our families a week’s notice,

got married in a state park’s parking lot, paid for nothing. 

Four years later, we are sitting on our bed: 

the baby, the dogs, and us if we can fit.

In our house 

which is really a barn, but in a functional way

listening to Otto laugh and laugh and laugh, our breathing legend. 

Your spliff ratio is one bowl a night, after the baby sleeps.

They inhale my nipple like it’s sweet cereal milk, 

their lungs are the shuttle returning home.

Twenty-six years of our lives that felt like seconds,

orbiting around the center of our galaxy.