Two Poems

Allison Blevins

Cosmic Microwave Background

The beginning floats through space, like us, as sound—the sound of
first light, creation exploding ever out, a delicate shush like a mother,
breasts full and soft, all matter swaddled in the sweet rush of breath
from her open mouth.

No matter where I stand, everything is moving away from me. I am the
center of the universe, but all I see is the past streaking away—dead
stars, hydrogen, and your voice murmuring against my ear.

Do you remember me before I got sick? My children respond with the
silence of their gaping mouths—black vacuums—and the drowned
whir of our car tires rotate along salted pavement.

Fearful Symmetry

When a symmetry breaking event occurs, you can no longer swap
around symbols and equations in the same way, and this change in
symmetry expresses itself as altered behavior in the physical world.

At this point in my research, I’m in too deep. I never took physics
or advanced math, and my body refuses to follow the science, attacks
the white matter and optic nerve.

You exist on this planet, in this room, in this breath and with this
hairdo because symmetry was broken just after the big bang. Like my
brain filling with a constellation of black holes—patchwork of scars.

Inside my body, a new universe is just beginning—matter and
molecules, dark energy all raked together in some pre-universe
muck, and I want to believe something beautiful is slowly forming
inside me.