Featured Poem II • October 2014
Dualities
Rose Lemberg
The universal flow of prime numbers unleashed from your/my sleeves surrounds you/me in pillars of light. I/you never understood math, you/I never knew much about architecture, languages, the processing of speech into data and storysong, that wordshaping that anchored me/you in the ground. You/I navigate between stars with motion/no motion that exists outside timeflow and yet bound in it; the manifold, unfolding along the pathways of the veins. You/I understand little of the laws that frame me/you, and yet we broke up with the fathers of our children, wept/silently grit teeth over our sons’ disabilities, kept quiet/spoke over the screams of the body, took new lovers in an attempt/absolution over despair/despair. you/I, emergent and merged through this language, this silence, this memory of forgetting, through kinetic numbers and the accumulation of sung lives: I/you, traversing this desert/this space shall speak/sing with hope ascendant. Falling upward, you/I will not merge into a cohesion not of our designing. We will exist/be wound against each other in pillars of light, like DNA or prime numbers, like rivers, like storysongs into the earth, at the exit/entrance to the worlds that are becoming.
Rose Lemberg was born in Ukraine, and lived in subarctic Russia and Israel before immigrating to the US, where she works as a professor of Nostalgic and Marginal studies. Rose’s prose and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Unlikely Story, Interfictions, and other venues. She edits Stone Telling with Shweta Narayan, and is currently reading for her first anthology of fiction-like writing, An Alphabet of Embers. Rose can be found at roselemberg.net, and on Twitter as @roselemberg.
Regarding “Dualities,” she writes, “If you’d like to read more work in the SF-nal universe of ‘you’, look out for my forthcoming poem, ‘Archival testimony fragments/minersong’ (forthcoming in Uncanny).”
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