History of the World

Numbers are waves that hold together the flesh of the body.  
Everything moves.  Different schemes of numbers form:  
everything outside of us.  Numbers move confined in a body 
and — in sagacity of grounded or atmospheric stone, and in 
plants, everything alive, which means even air joins this union.  
Now:  choose one object to decipher.  Chip away and witness 
its essence as a certain vibration.  Call this a number.  Now look 
up until you see nothing:  this precise wonder.

Still Life

What if life was like a series of still lives,
each snapshot of each moment poised, stilled,
in and of itself for a devout moment before 
gliding into the next?  That embrace, this
quivering bird wing, each minute erosion of 
mountain and droplet of exhale all stilled 
one moment at a time?  Everything would be sacred then—
the button on a shirt, the moon glare reflected in a fox’s eye,
this table, that glance, your hand as you reach to a bowl, that 
clock, this night, that holy plum.

Karen Helman’s poems have appeared in Inlandia, Viewless Wings, and The Westchester Review. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

from the editors

Helman deconstructs time and space, and shows you how to do it, too. It always comes back to focus and attention. Frenetic motion can eventually be compelled to stillness. This is how pseudoscience should operate, not as long tomes designed to lull you into misguided faith, but lyrical bursts that excite you into new ideas, presented not with feigned objectivity but a vulnerable humanity.

DZ