Karen Holman

My Theory of Everything

Curved into space, like the country of a fetus, each letter
of night’s orthography, a city, a crux, meridian-point-
particle of conception in our extended family of Atom—
savants, still-births, binary system of fraternal twins,
sixth cousins with albinism, great-great-great-greats
and mother-nuclei, all futures collapsed into a kernel
which when blinked spools into an explosion for eons
and carries each snip of code to the fluttering canopy
of memory leaves of a book irrigated by veins of ore-
song, transpiring green biographies of immigrants,
electricians, suffragettes, orators, gymnasts and everywhere
everywhere women cooking always cooking alphabet soup,
singing an alphabet song, and the epicverse seems like
it goes on forever but maybe it’s only a Little Golden Book,
the neighborhood where you see Dick and Jane run
through the pages, days numbered likewise, digits
algorhythming into metropolises from pure miracle-
proof of how lucky, unlucky we are floating
in the background radiation of each life that ever
vibrated into dawn chorus from sea and land
to navigate the sky in mutating hybridizing genres
—the documentary-romantic-dystopian-historical-musical
tragicomedy starring aviatrixes, amphibians and AM radio hosts.
Coming to somewhere where someone is screaming fire
in a theater near you.
 

Little Sky
of Common Ground

Clairvoyant trees
—spindle neurons—
their quiver-branch seismographs
describe

each flux of air.

A mining bee’s wings
blows breath
through his piccolo home

each note bent by hand
with a Theremin,
rays angled
by a glass of water.

In the afterlife
fish ascend to float
through canopies of autumn
trailing ripples of sky.

A snake and her shadow
dance in the sand.

To air who gives
and takes away
this or that spark
of pollen—

my bent knees, my aquamarines

brighter than oxygen.

Karen Holman works for community mental health in metro Detroit. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and serves on the editorial staff of december magazine. Her chapbook features in New Poets, Short Books, vol. IV. Her poetry has aired on NPR, been honored with several Pushcart nominations, frames composer David Evan Thomas’ oratorio, The First Apostle, and was performed by Pencilpoint Theatreworks in Fight Like a Girl.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.