Jeneva Stone
How I Explain Entanglement to My Husband
I read this in a book on physics:
nothing exists
until it collides
with something else.
These fingers striking invisible sparks
for instance
off a keyboard
while a sound
traces patterns through
an electromagnetic field
and an ear decodes
these bits
of floating conflict.
I had to learn to love the world
by peeling each day apart
digging thumbs
into the rind of it
dividing the sun
into segments
like the curves of space-time
sucking the juices
spitting packets of pure light
photons like seeds
into the blackness of space
where they wandered
along the path brightness makes
as it hurtles
at impossible speed away
from an always-dying star.
Scientists now think
the universe expands infinitely
as if they too
cannot bear
to contemplate an end
only the possibility
of distant collisions
of time and energy.
I had to learn to love the world
by coming apart
the white pith of me straggling
through the universe.
When I say I love you
this is what I mean:
passion is just
a decoder ring
click by click
defining the terms
the instances
of our co-mingling
or our drifting apart.
How to Pray for a Dying City
When you know what it feels like to fail
ferociously
how tactile, the bruising and beating
fingers digging in to blush your skin
unending collapse of the stories
beneath
that falling sensation in dreams
a sensation of watching Troy’s towers
from a distance as its impregnable
walls are broached vivid red yellow blue
flames
into the night and then the terror
blanched in daylight to sand in every direction
Where is the key to the kingdom except
in a dream?
old-fashioned loop and stem adorned
by a stave or clef, music of the spheres
unlocked
in a moment of devastation, classical clatter
of drums and bassoons, the string section
When you know what it feels like to fail
rapidly
flip of a coin, whirl of flat object
become a globe, its silver marred by
a cheap copper inset, this dream of
Cassandra’s—
edifices on fire, a moral flickering
in that mayhem of flames—I see you
she said, as if foresight were wisdom
I see you under crumpled battlements
and fallen beams, still alive in that pocket
fate
made for you—what’s failure but erasure
of a splintered past? swipe of bonded felt
removing dusty chalk traces, calcifications,
that same mineral from which our bones are
made
JENEVA STONE (she/her) is a poet, essayist and advocate. Her work has appeared in NER, APR, Waxwing, Scoundrel Time, Cutbank, Posit, and many others. She is the author of Monster (Phoenicia Publishing, 2016), a mixed-genre counterpoint to and meditation on conventional tropes about caregiving and disability. Jeneva is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, and VCCA, and has been nominated multiple times for a Pushcart Prize. She and her son Rob volunteer for multiple health care and disability rights groups, including Little Lobbyists, Be A Hero, National Organization for Rare Disorders and the Maryland Rare Disease Advisory Council. Website: jenevastone.com