star line

X was different.
You couldn’t see it unless you were right up close to
Her pupil.
A Glassy Galaxy of adhesions pulling in to
a five-point Star.

Like a tiny blackhole, drawing inwards
jade green and amber fibres
from her eye.

It’s so cool, Y says,
but how can you see?
through a pentagram

A stencilled iris
atrophying
in a ring of nodules and filaments; in the perceivable,
forms a canvas of
haloes and prismatic edges, all
willowing in the particulate light.

In the darkness, she sees.
Pulsing grains of violet and lime.
Blurred reds, and orange veins
crisscross like cotton fibres. In the rotation of X and Y.
where a small island, floats in
the centre
four-point perspective.

Instead of blackness, there are
Mach bands. Instead of saturation,
cochineal and clementine arteries
woven into the optical field.
Stereographic
Shrinking perspective
moving backwards,
accelerating away from the image.

Like the sable hairs of a cosmic paintbrush, gliding through oil slick landscapes
that only imagined a painter.

A constellation of rods and cones, in the seer’s symbolic—coordinates, Z—the uveal
chorus of optic nerves. The retina
flooding the pupil,
and X entering
into the star line.

Naomi Simone Borwein holds a PhD in English literature. Her work appears across a spectrum of presses: HWA Poetry Showcase IX, Farside Review, Superpresent Magazine, Gatorbites, and elsewhere. A past head poetry editor for Swamp Writing (2018-2022), she is a reader for Thanatos Review. Her poetry has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.