Jessica Kim | Come back when you're done reading the poem
The multiverse poses a threat to modern physics
and just about everyone except me,
because not everything in the world is
empirical. Observation is not a necessity.
Because I want my body to exist
in multiple costumes. Love multiple tragedies.
The year is 1975. Stop-motion films
fling the universe into motion. Then, stillness,
all at once. I am on a train to Busan and
simultaneously getting divorced and reading
Jack Kerouac in the kitchen and falling
into a pothole. I am also dead and unborn.
I am also a doe with quiet eyes. We meet
at the end, all intact, our dreams
becoming hypotheses that can never
be proven. Animals waiting to be devoured.
Our neighbors, the physicists, argue all night
about cosmic inflation and superposition,
but even possibility is merely a theory
crafted to kill fear. I am afraid of drowning
in technicolor, the cosmic microwave
background drawing us in like little fires.
I can hear my dreams screaming at me,
flashing in red flicks. Close-ups of my face
with all its blemishes. My father’s fists.
Gas station flamin’ hot Cheetos.
Some of these do not exist in other worlds
but I still do. Call that optimism,
if you will. I am smiling with my teeth
like shoveled bones. This poem
defies the laws of gravitation. It will
scurry upwards. This poem does not end
with a big bang. Instead—
