“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember?”

SINGULARITY

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SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe
          (after Stephen Hawking)
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money --
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if
the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with
is is is is is
All   everything   home

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Complement with an ink-and-watercolor animation of Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz’s gorgeous poem of brokenness and belonging and an animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s feminist revision of the history of science.