Another dead journal. Egg dead. Here are the poems that originally appeared there.

The Only Poem I’ve Written in April

I am reading Franz Wright
in the food court
of an outlet mall
in Leeds, Alabama.
This is the poem.

Balance

Scientists at the Large Hadron may have found the God particle. I was raised to believe that God is both particle and wave or maybe that was something else. I can’t remember, because I now ride the trailing end of the arc. An arthritic pediatrician who attends painting classes instead of patients. I anxiously check my balance daily. It is supposed to give objects their mass.

Fresh Air and Ritual

Flowing out into the streets, we laughed, embarrassed and relieved, giddy at how easy the answers were. As if we all had been looking for our glasses, a search begun by our ancestors, and there they were, on the tops of our heads. As if we had spent ten thousand years trying to think of the name of that woman at the office we had known so well and then, unbidden, it came to us. Why? Why was that so hard? It turned out to be nothing more than this: treasures in the crust, gifted to us by the stars but unknown to our ancestors. Particle collisions, visible to the naked eye, that explain gravity, and defeat it. Universal patterns of growth in the second trimester of pregnancy. Bellies filled by insight but not with insight. Cruelty contained, at last, by fresh air and ritual.