Rosebud Ben-Oni | 109Mt :: In Which the Poetic Science of our Collective Self Is— {Past —CONTINUOUS} Continuum

Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Paramount commissioned her video essay "My Judaism is a Wild Unplace" for a national media campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, and her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial. She performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day, as part "We Are Here: Songs From The Holocaust." Most recently, her poem "When You Are the Arrow of Time" was commissioned and filmed by the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020), which she began in honor of the Periodic Table's 150th Birthday in 2019. She has received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Queens Council for the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, among others.

Also by Rosebud Ben-Oni: If This is the Age We End Discovery turn around, BRXGHT XYXS

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Poet Wrestling with Bunnicula in the Challenger Deep Tundras

October 2, 2024

Rosebud Ben-Oni

₁₀₉Mt :: In Which the Poetic Science of our Collective Self Is— {Past —^CONTINUOUS} Continuum

— for Erika Meitner How long to live, the was in the wishing, the gauze set of real numbers— when earth's magnetic fields flip &— new supercontinent, all foregone & needing no forgiveness—¬ no, no one is alone in this, nothing gradual ourself, always asking— was, that is— for longer off-lift for half-life— for one of only two elements named after a woman who isn't a mythical goddess— so I stood— real, realized, was under -standing, numbered, two weeks continuous, running as if that is the beam, limits, tense, what lasting 1.7 milliseconds means before decay & serving no purpose, for science only I was will be dreaming of Kardaschev Type III, when endless my were-to-be warp -drive of Dyson trees, beyond fusion, new, neutrino, nuclei— bubbling—

As stated in the sonnet, this superheavy element is one of only two named after a woman who is not a mythological figure, the singular Lise Meitner, a Jewish Austrian-Swedish physicist who herself discovered the element protactinium in 1917-1918 and was later part of the joint discovery of nuclear fission as a replicable process (for which Meitner was not awarded the Nobel Prize in 1944, which went to nuclear chemist and co-collaborator Otto Hahn alone; the author here feels Meitner was robbed. The author here will not go into detail about the 49 times Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize — 19 times for Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and an additional 30 times for Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967 — and never won.) Anyway. When element 109 was first synthesized by Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenber in 1982, its existence also proved that fusion could make very proton-heavy nuclei. Officially named Meitnerium in 1997, this element has a very, very short half-life, and therefore, very little of it has ever been made; often it's cited as having no "practical purpose." The author here disagrees. No, Meitnerium, like all superheavies, has possibilities we are only beginning to understand, stoking new fires of our restless imaginations, pushing past the very boundaries of what nature says can happen. Meitnerium, element of this author's dreams, the potential of a civilization that will be, one day, Kardaschev Type III.