But Gravity Still Exists Physics predicts loneliness. There is this matter of matter moving away from all matter, the increasing quantity of nothing between all things. But gravity still exists he says, frying eggs in the kitchen. I can still move toward you.
Adam & the Void
“You evolve, perfectly deterministically, from a single person now into multiple persons at a future time.”
-Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden
If indeed we become infinite us
I cannot help but wonder after
the probabilistic smear of me[s],
imagining the superposition.
I cannot help but wonder after
our entanglement, if you & I survive
in an imagined superposition
like the blue globes on a bayberry.
Our entanglement, if we survive
numerous, smelling of candlewax
like the blue globes on a bayberry
predictably branching in ignorance.
Numerous, smelling of candles
we burn for our dear dead while
predictably branching in ignorance, in
how many of the many worlds we love.
From the Author: I am forever trying to find a way to relate the principles of modern physics to our lived experiences as people in a universe of nearly ungraspable natural laws. These two poems attempt to understand many-worlds theory, the overwhelming presence of dark matter, and the constant expansion of space and time, as well as the mysteries of human love. They owe a debt to the Greek philosopher Democritus, who posited that everything was only either atoms or the void.
Jacquelyn Bengfort was born in North Dakota and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy. Her creative work has been supported by a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship, three individual artist grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and a scholarship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Jacquelyn is the author of the Ghost City Press micro-chapbooks Navy News Service and Suitable for All Methods of Communication. She lives in Iowa City with her family.
