Glitter City
Lorraine Schein
6/30/26
Lorraine Schein, a NY writer, has published in Strange Horizons, Vallum, Scientific American, Michigan Quarterly, Utopia Science Fiction, and the anthologies Underland Arcana and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. Her books include The Futurist’s Mistress (poetry, Mayapple Press) and The Lady Anarchist Cafe (stories and poems), available from Autonomedia and Amazon.
“Gravity’s eff ects on spacetime are felt
diff erently by diff erent wavelengths of light…
if rainbow gravity is correct, spacetime may
have a drastically diff erent origin story
than the widely accepted picture of the Big
Bang.” -- Scientific American, 2013
If this is a rainbow universe,
time had no beginning,
the Big Bang never happened.
The black hole
in the center of the Milky Way
gulped rainbows, not white light.
Light sped through space,
its photons streaming into wavelengths.
Colors rayed apart,
ribboning endlessly into a cosmic prism,
arcing over the void.
On Earth, a prism forms
of sunlit air.
If our rainbow universe goes back forever,
maybe this city will go on forever too.
A full spectrum of glittering buildings,
viewed from above: kaleidoscopal,
radiating light up endlessly through a
redorangeyellowgreenblueindigoviolet world.