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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
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      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
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      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
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      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
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    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
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      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
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      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
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      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
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      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
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      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
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    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
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    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
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    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025

B. Tyler Lee

Schrödinger’s Heart


I know you think it’s defective, a mass of busted tubing
you can’t fill the way others do with kitten sneezes
and baby elephant eyes, with snow-dusted Christmas
trees and families marshalled to breathe in cloved ham.
The trappings which fuel the ordinary heart can’t sustain
you—you couldn’t locate a valve to pump a dozen red
roses through if you tried.
                                                     Your heart, instead,
is Schrödinger’s box: sealed, radioactive, noxious. Or not.
All states contained at once—a bomb detonated and coiled
in wait, your love in rigor mortis even as it teems and buzzes.
Your grief both looms (a derelict staircase rising endlessly
into the mesosphere) and fixes itself (an obsidian slab
sinking into Earth’s mantle). Your anger is electron
and proton, dark matter and the crime scene photographer’s
blazing flash. Unmeasured, immune to epistemologies,
your heart starts and stops time at whim, Saturn’s
archrival. Niels Bohr could better explain your heart
than Carl Jung: you occur as wave function and wormhole,
enduring ampersand.
                                        You’ve called your heart a failure,
unfillable. But it’s only because you’ve wasted your life--
your Janusian leaping across all of space and spectral flux--
searching for the nonexistent fuel door to a quantum engine.


Mrs. Mencken, 1930

      Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
​      
Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
                                    —H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken


In Montgomery that summer, I found a mourning dove hung
by its trident foot, caught in the red yarn of a nest
 
as it tried to take flight—for the first time, the last.
 
It shuddered alive at my touch, an angry coo
blooming from its throat. I could not free it
 
without crushing one wing, and still Alabama
 
would not approve my right to vote. 1919. You remember.
Even after that Tennessee man reread his mother’s
 
letter--be a good boy…and vote for suffrage—and passed
 
our measure, I kept the browning leaflets. Look for them
in the top drawer of my chest when this all goes south
 
again. Suffrage, we called it, as if each ballot formed
 
a wound, as if making all people victims also made
them equal. How could you? Such a misogynist, you say now.
 
My word is shorter: Henry. Ask about my marriage
 
and I will tell you about the blood blooming
in my lungs. That here, consumption means
 
we are all consumed. And my name--Sara
 
sometimes means Look at the salt stains left on this pillow,
or, Read this column; find the errors. When we finish,
 
and the commas have found their peace, Sara is wife,
 
even just woman. We are all the same and none alike,
hung by our own needs to flail and cough, to splinter.
 
Offer me nine years and a female senator.
 
Offer me your one vaccine. Offer me a new disease
with a beautiful name: typhus, cholera, silent
 
anemia. Failing all else, offer me five more years
 
of Sara and Henry. Throw coins to the sources
of my stories; bind me to the false life
 
of the swiftly dying. Let there be nothing left
 
but woman and man, our sweats and hatreds
caught in bitter symmetry—blossom
 
and loss, blossom and loss.







--
B. Tyler Lee is the author of one poetry collection, With Our Lungs in Our Hands (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016), and her creative nonfiction piece “●A large volume of small nonsenses” just won the 2020 Talking Writing Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sky Island, perhappened, Acting Up: Queer in the New Century, and elsewhere. She teaches at Purdue University Northwest.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025