The Excavation of Now, Miracle Equations, & Unfolding

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David M. Alper

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The Excavation of Now

I stand in the kitchen, hands submerged in soapy
water, the weight of the dishes providing a comfort.
Outside, a cardinal flashes red against the green
backdrop, reminding me that beauty endures, even in
the most ordinary moments.

I think of my grandmother’s hands and how they took
dough and kneaded perfect spheres, how silence
could shout. Her calluses now sleep in my palms-a
roadmap to our ancestry my soapy fingers trace.

My grandfather’s name is the hollow of my chest, a
presence born from absence. I wonder if he knows
how his story branded my bones, how I carry in my
blood the ink of his departure.

The taste of the first love on my tongue-sweet and
sharp as the summer berries-lingers on. To love risks
everything, everything, for naught. The curve of
home in a loved one’s smile can be found there.

I am layers and layers, a palimpsest of identities. War
and poetry run in tangles in my veins; every word an
act of defiance no greater than little against the
burden of forgetting. I am the flower of survival
which blooms out of cracked concrete.

The cardinal calls again, persistent. I dry my hands
and step outside. The world is filled with questions I
can’t answer, but here, in this moment, the sun warms
my face. I am alive, unfinished, and that is enough.

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Miracle Equations

I am measuring flour for biscuits in the
kitchen.
You and quarks come to my mind.
How are we all just vibrating strings
in an uncertain universe?

Cracking the egg, I see a yolk fall
like a yellow sun into the bowl.

You loved physics,
trying to explain entanglement over breakfast.
Now I’m tangled in your absence,
a knot any theorem can’t uncoil.

Outside, the bird feeder swings, empty then plenty.
Schrödinger would appreciate
this backyard ballet of probabilities.

I salt, remembering how you said
we’re just stardust rearranged.

It is preheating, beeping, a timer counting seconds as particles decay.
I roll out biscuit dough and push down with the cutter.
The circles are put under my hands into determined shapes.
The biscuits rise.
Maybe grief obeys the laws of quantum theory.
It all existed, many ways at once.

I am whole and broken all at the same time-
grieving and healing.
Paradoxes in the toughness of the heart.
The timer beeps.
I pull out the golden rounds, steam rising toward spirits.

And all of the equations melt
Of flavor in my mouth alive at this one instant.

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Unfolding

We are spiders who hope to catch in the web of
time, with our palms being terrain features of the
lines of uncertainty. Another day is a flowing
water that we never know where is it going to take
us— in the calm waters of yesterday, today’s tide is
like a foreigner. Rain hums against my umbrella, a
lonely song of reflection and distance. I catch
myself in an antique window, a bird flirting with
its own shadowed possibility. My last ten dollars
pressed against a fortune teller’s door, seeking
proof that I am not yet a ghost in my own story.
We are rivers without maps, wishes floated in on
paper boats, immovable as the heart that refuses to
be contained. Here I am: still breaking windows,
still breathing, still believing in the unwritten
tomorrow. But wait— The spider’s web trembles,
catches fire. I am the owl diving into nothingness,
the warm beast coming to you in the dark. My
palms ignite with newfound lines, no longer
seeking, but carving fate. I press myself down with
a long pole until I am still, until I am lightning,
until I am human enough to say: I have had enough
of gentle currents. I am the storm that rewrites the
sky.

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David M. Alper‘s work appears in Louisiana Literature, Red Ogre Review, Oxford Magazine, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.

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