Quantum Suicide Machine

K.T.

the waters reflect the face of a drowned man
ribboned by wreck and wave;

i long to see some defined edge
in blood and sugar,
biological organs, entangled:

the drowned man exists in pauses and sighs,
scattered phrases from a dialogue
with only one participant.

my catalyst for a glimpse of the sublime
in the drowned man's eyes
lies in physics, fissure;

there is
a refrain there, a trace of a circadian cycle
caught in the ticking of a cooling engine—

the drip of water pooling in creases and
the glow of bacteria motes,
quantum vacillations in my guts;

separate a particle, interlaced, and
at the opposite ends of time,

a single hemisphere of coherence
carves eclipses in sea, sky;

where the drowned man saw galaxies,
i saw the ocean,
scratching out divisions upon the cliffs,
over foam and fracture.

the surface dithers, a shimmer in the marine snow
falling from the water column;

below the cliff edge,
the seawalls drip with lizards;
diadems of oyster shells
crown the bones
of the shoreline,

their skeletons calcified.

brittle
broken
desperately light,

the sea is unable to contain the shattering
of my heart, catch my fingernails falling like

loose change;

the stars gutter in the slipstream,
a cold-cathode fluorescence.

the light becomes fixed: open and staring,
eyes turned on themselves;

i meet the rock and the drowned man's face,
watch a universe bloom from nothing:

pink and purple suns, a thousand silver moons,
bouquets and bursts of bioluminescence.

he and i, seized in a sway of shine and shadow
caught in an undertow

drifting

towards the sky

K.T. is a time traveller, tourist, and newly discovered cryptid. Combining an inexplicable love of physics with a stubborn attachment to writing, K.T. crafts (with varying degrees of success) stories and poems that experiment with time, space, and superpositive cats that are both alive and dead. They are the author of four novels, and their works of short fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in Mad Scientist Journal, Stylus, Supplement, Tinge, Rainy Day, Blue Door, and others. They just want to take a nap.