Ghosts are supposed to fade, and light is supposed to be the one thing a black hole never gives back. Q.R. Quasar's poem bends both rules until they snap. Its light-ghosts crowd around a black hole the way animals crowd around a watering hole, and the title's pun, "drink at their black hole," sets the tone. A place of annihilation becomes a place of daily habit, even of home. The hole belongs to them: "their black hole."
The first stanza assembles its creatures from mismatched parts. The light-ghosts "bark" like dogs, "flit" like moths, and "jab with their beaks" like birds at a pond. No real animal combines these behaviours, which is the point. This is a bestiary invented on the spot, and it lives around an "accretion disk," a genuine astronomical term for the swirl of matter spiralling into a black hole. The poem sets a technical phrase beside folk-tale creatures without apology, and that mixture of physics and myth is its signature move.
The second stanza raises the stakes. "Their heads get sucked in," so the danger is real, but the ghosts "break free with their light screams." Escape is the impossible event here, since nothing is meant to leave a black hole, and the poem states it as casually as a habit. Then comes the most startling image: they "shatter the brittle edges of gravity / and snap up the jagged pieces to eat." Gravity, the force that should be unbreakable, turns into something like glass or ice, and the shards become food. The sound reinforces this. Hard, clipped consonants run through the passage (bark, beaks, break, brittle, black, snap), so the lines themselves feel like something cracking.
Digestion follows, in the plainest verb the poem could choose: "they digest the darkness." Nothing is fought off. The dark is taken in and converted. The phrase "black radiance comes out the inside" is an oxymoron, and a reader who knows that black holes are thought to leak a faint glow may hear an echo of that idea, though the poem never needs it. What comes next is the oddest shift in register: "dimensions are rebooted, refitted." Suddenly we are in the language of computers and workshops, as if reality were a device being patched. After the barking and beaks, the jolt of tech vocabulary suggests that the ghosts are not only feeding but rebuilding the universe around them.
The shape of the poem carries its meaning too. It is free verse, with no rhyme and no capital letters, and its only punctuation is a single colon. Without full stops, the sentences slide into one another like matter sliding down a gravity well. The rhythm comes from repetition instead: *they flit, they break free, they shatter, they digest*. That steady "they" at the start of lines makes the stanzas feel like a chant or a ritual. The stanzas also shrink, from four lines to four to four, then two, then one, so the poem seems to be drawn down toward a point, or to condense the way vapour does.
That condensing is what the "phase change" names. The term comes from the science of ice, water and steam, and here it describes a ghost becoming a body: "the light-ghosts gather flesh." The colon before it works like a drumroll. The final line, "as they put on solid radiance," is a single line that begins with a lowercase "as." It is a dependent clause with no main clause to lean on, and it ends with no full stop. The transformation is still happening when the poem stops.
The central idea is that you become real by consuming what threatens to consume you. The darkness is the ghosts' nourishment, and "solid radiance" is a paradox, light that finally has weight. Whether you read this as a story about growing up, grieving, making art, or simply a strange cosmic fable, the poem leaves room for all of them. The pen name fits too. Quasars are the brilliant glows powered by black holes feeding, though whoever stands behind it, the poem makes its own case. Its achievement is to turn the most frightening object in astronomy into a source of birth, and to do it with humour, hunger and a sharp ear for sound.