Danika Stegeman LeMay
Quantum Entanglement

An object can be moved or changed without being physically touched. Unscrew the bolts the
whole thing like a pin.* This is action at a distance. I ignite. I forget my intent. I strike a
match and leave the book unfolded. I open the window to let the air out. I remove my
animal from the room.

Stepping outside elicits audible disgust. It’s a medicine that doesn’t work. The snow turns to
vapor before my eyes. A hand materializes in mine, then disappears. The fog’s density
fluctuates depending on my proximity to bodies of water. I feel what moves beneath the ice. 

I see a small white plane overhead. I leave my demon in the woods. It walks too tall with
antlers pinioning. The trees creak. Cirrus clouds and the cacophony of birds stop abruptly as
I draw near. Today I feel like galaxies. I wish for what’s mine. Hunger is a kind of pain. 

I take a sharp paring knife, score a cross-hatch pattern half an inch deep. I wish for a field as
its own physical entity. I wish for instantaneous action not propagated in time. I wish to be
felt as a force by other charges carrying momenta. Some days I have images but no words.

I say I feel it in my bones. You say I want to see your bones. When two particles are bound, a
change to one instantaneously changes the other in the same way even when the particles are
separated by unimaginable distances. Dirt holding hands with dirt. My bones turn opalescent.

We float above a fathomless abyss of black water. This is the tube that connects the hearing
part to the part that listens to the heart. We disengage from the parade of moon-faced
creatures bathed in underwhelming light. Stay where you are until I get there. 

*This line belongs to Bernadette Mayer (Midwinter Day p. 59)

*

Floodplain

I chain a garland of long a’s and wait for the ricochet. 

A wolf’s voice reverberates as painstricken, as human, how shadow works the perimeter of firelight. 

Give my water to the trees when I’m through. 

Once the light poles were columns of wood the termites papered open. 

I leave my coil of radiation in remembrance of the arc that spilled the lawn and proliferated
the night with shards of insects. 

I pull leaves to divinate the future.

Like a floodplain a forest encroaches.

These months I project myself into fever are plagued by drought. 

For weeks I can’t stop bleeding.

I can’t say coincidence. 

Hold my leaf. 

Now hold my other leaf.