superimposition

This poem was submitted as part of Catalyst’s 2020 Writing Contest. To view more submissions from the Writing Contest, please visit utcatalyst.org/writing-contest.

Photo Credit: Kai Pilger

Courtesy of Upsplash

i am but the speck of space dust

that didn’t get swept under the rug

small enough to be considered small but small

enough to inconvenience

i am but a single humming particle

singing along your sine wave synth

heartbeat follows undular theory

but you don’t

if matter is neither created nor destroyed

then particle physics has a particularly

bad sense of humor because you leave

all the time

prism shift spectral shards through your irises

and refract them back through me

wrapping telomeres around ring fingers

to make forever finite

weaving 1000 thread-count

sheets out of nucleotide sequences and

oscillating between them to assume form

i realize superimposition

is human

and day and night are subjective

and light is a liquid

and water is a solid

and i’ve written you into too many formulas

deriving you out of yourself and back again

the theory of everything

the theory of you