It’s just the two of us now
here in our spaceship
on the brink of a black hole.

It won’t be long, Anna,
before we’re in its throat, perhaps
swallowed into its infinity.

Computer. Engage ship’s
magnetic field, counter-rotate
into swirls of that monster’s maul.

I quiver. An old prayer spills off
my tongue onto my lips as I brace,
my hand in yours:

Barukh hashem Adonai
Melekh ha`olam,
Hoshanah!

I was ten the last time I said that.      
My sister, my mother, my father
told me to go, to go quickly

and ride my bike as fast as I could
pedal through the cobbled alleys
to my uncle’s house—other side of town

while they created a diversion
for me. I wish my family could’ve run
and hid like me. That prayer failed.

We’ll be okay, Yacob, God is
with us no matter where
we go, even in the darkest place.

We slip past the churning,
our spaceship electrified,
cocooned in a web of fields

where gravity and magnetism
entwine inside the event horizon.
We can no longer escape

into our world, but space and time
twist into each other more tightly
than our own hearts’ entanglement—

a quantum entanglement ensuring
us that who we are here will prevail
as our phantom selves. We’ll still be

alive when our ship punches through
to another universe, another time.
Maybe in this one, there will be

no Hitler, no Holocaust...
but if there is, we’ll know better
what to do.

John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, and Baltimore Review. Winner of numerous awards and seven published collections [including three chapbooks], he edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. He’s a retired physics professor living in Knoxville, Tennessee.