Gravity’s gone, gravel’s up. She vomits
vodka and chips in the parking lot. The Beemer
just misses. The Jag swerves like time. What luck!
Stars blue, stars yellow, stars orange, and red
fill her mouth. She gags on a galaxy. Jagged
pieces of some old self tumble in a sloppy blanket
‘round her knees. Sure, the vault of heaven
must be empty now. Sure, she’s made
the void, the void. But no–arms wide, she cries,
“Stars! Stars! Look at the stars!” Vomit
drips from fingertips. It slips down arms
and settles in pits. It twinkles and ripples and comes
to rest. “You’re warped,” she tells only herself.
“Warped enough to make new stars,” she parries.

S.K. Tatiner is a student, teacher, and lover of poetry. She is an instructor at the Writers Studio in NYC. Her chapbook, Traitor’s Bluff, was published in 2023. Vomiting Stars Poetica will appear in the October edition of the journal Tap into Poetry.

She believes a physicist should always be on time,
but tonight, she’s late—

moonlight pooling on her bathroom’s checkerboard tiles
as her thumb eclipses the tiny indicator window.

For now, an unobserved result is both joy and pain,
her life’s wave function not yet collapsed.

For now, her entanglement with a chronically tardy economist
remains Schrödinger’s love, simultaneously broken and eternal.

But she fears superposition is a small step away from delusion,
so her neurons fire wildly, like electrons

excited to a higher orbit, contemplating a quantum jump
to a state of motherhood.

This is no shift between hyperfine states, it’s a leap
from theoretical to practical. Perhaps she won’t make it,

or perhaps she’ll quantum tunnel right through to the other side.
If only she could peel back the future to see if it all works out.

If only she were as reliable as a Cesium clock, immaculate
and cool and golden inside, despite a turbulent world outside.

She could keep time
with this oscillating heart.

Ian Li (he/him) is a Chinese-Canadian economist, developer, writer, and poet who started writing in late 2023 after a lifetime of believing he could never be creative. He also enjoys spreadsheets, statistical curiosities, and brain teasers. His poetry can be found in Small Wonders, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many other venues.

They had the same print
In their living rooms, Lowry:
Coming Home from the Mill, 1928.

And whenever they glanced
At this lost world,
They felt the familiarity

Of that other place
Which was also home,
Suffusing them with a sense

Of being in two places at once,
Unsure where each began
And the other ended.

She said they were the couple
On the bottom right, moving away
From the patchy crowd

With its comedy hats and boots,
Solo dances, simple mimes,
And pavement melodramas.

All gone, like the factories
The coloured wagon and
The open doors of terraced houses.

Once more his eye is drawn
To the couple heading out of
The frame; arms linked, in step,

And he wonders if she still
Feels this ghostly closeness,
The nearest they come to touching now.

Gary Day is a retired literature lecturer. He is the author of several books, including Class, Literary Criticism: A New History, and The Story of Drama. He was a reviewer and TV critic for the Times Higher has had poems published in Acumen, The Dawn Treader, The High Window, and various others. He is still actively involved in amateur dramatics.