IN EVERY MARRIAGE THERE WILL BE QUANTUM SUICIDE & PROPERTIES OF ACIDS / ALICE CAMPBELL ROMANO
IN EVERY MARRIAGE THERE WILL BE QUANTUM SUICIDE
If I shoot myself on this patio, the theory goes, I survive
in Many-Worlds. Each path doesn’t simply quit
after it bends at the yellow undergrowth.
I stomped, I cried, I threw things. I screamed at Mother.
Husband—did I choose you as my lover or my penance?
Many-Worlds: Where Mother doesn’t always bare her
teeth behind bright red lips and Daddy doesn’t drive away
to the bars. Husband—you can’t know I’m not alive, or dead.
Or alive and dead. Some days, you’ll like me dead. Others,
as long as I write your letters, cook your food, stifle my
retorts, you’re satisfied. Husband, of course you have your
lives too. Innumerable—don’t you just adore it!—infinite
permutations of you. But may the god of quantum mechanics
grant me this: that in some—at least some—of all the parallel,
all the Many-Worlds, I will never, no, never run into you.
PROPERTIES OF ACIDS
Fractions of acid in follicular fluid at conception
increase chances of a female child.
He tells me
when he’s on a rant
every three months or so
You’re a miserable, unhappy woman,
negative even before I finish my sentence.
You can’t change. It’s in your cells.
I have to wonder: is it?
Did a corrosive fate bathe
the fallopian bed
where my mother’s egg met
my father’s sperm?
Soured for life, am I? Gender
is a fraction of myself. But
I am female, and when he rages
at me because I dare
to speak, he insults the woman.
Acids have the ability to conduct
electricity. The air crackles,
we both are shocked. Acids etch
metal surfaces in order to create designs,
and to purify. Caustic I may be,
and I’ll examine that, but the base
metal he is made of is brighter, sharper,
because of the abilities of acid.
ALICE CAMBELL ROMANO / LOS ANGELES, CA
Joy Delaney was Alice’s only friend at age 10, but Alice slapped Joy’s face after Joy told her what other kids were whispering. Rumor was, Alice had been sent to live with her grandmother because Alice slapped her mother’s face. Years later, Alice’s mother tried to explain why she sent Alice to live with grandma. Alice couldn’t take in whatever it was her mother said. But she did see how her mother struggled with the confession—and yet Alice didn’t open her arms, didn’t forgive. More years later, Alice admits she is on the downslope, that no one is left from the past to answer anything that matters—but dying without knowing doesn’t worry her; it’s dying without apologizing that hurts: Sorry, Joy, sorry, Mother, sorry everyone I ever loved.