ISSUE V
Zeke Shomler
Buying Groceries While the Universe Expands
As much as you would like to disperse into a field
as the fickle carefree spores of a fruiting body,
you have work to do. There are the mysteries
of consciousness and then there is the pile
of laundry on the chair that eyes you
as you try to fall asleep. Just this morning
I realized I don't know the difference
between shale and slate. I know the young red shoots
of the fireweed plant are edible
and tender before flowering, that spruce tips taste
bright and tangy as a loneliness. It’s like gravity:
immutable and subject to change. You make
your bed and tuck the corners in but they’ll be
undone by tonight. Sometimes I fluctuate
as spacetime near two orbiting black holes.
Sometimes I don’t think I have the faith
to continue. What is faith
but a hope that you decide you should believe in?
What is necessity but a stone
fruit shedding its skin? Every week I decide
to be a different person and every week without fail
I fail.
Celestial Bodies
I keep redownloading the Co-star app
because I don’t know what kind of person
I am. I take ten Buzzfeed quizzes
and compare my answers with the group chat
but every day I wake up and Venus
is an entirely new animal. Relative to the sun
I am small and very quiet, I hardly
radiate at all; relative to the moon
I am a failed sister. I know I was born
in a hospital named for a saint
on a sunny summer Wednesday
and I used to eat fresh strawberries
on my birthday. Now I eat
new aches, become these strange
refractions. Most of what we think we see
is empty space, dark matter, push
and pull. It’s all spooky action
at a distance, it’s entanglement
of self with shards of light. All I know
is what the midnight Mars-rise tells me.
Who’s to say that none of this is worth my hope.
Zeke Shomler is an MA/MFA candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work has appeared in Folio, Cordite, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere.