My physics
by Ethan Stanton
From the other side i hold the butterflies. My words trace hidden ones, inverted letters, the invisible writer poking back. Constant flitting, found created things, sentences carved in marble. It’s the coffee maker oracle button, upstairs sky through the ceiling, the ladder. White space.
I see both i see all. The way the war, the war on the screen. I see youmewei. When god asked the infinity mirrors to stop shivering. The thing has no off switch this think, has no off switch. Butterflies blue on white plastic. Small, in my pocket. They save me, i’ve been told.
I have never been in a war, thank god, but in the war with the coffee maker we always are. i am the oracle, I am the button. Come and press me. Open open open, this thing eats god for breakfast and spits us back out. i have sympathy for myself. The girl on the stretcher, in the bloody pink unicorn pajamas, after the bomb.
No war has ever been real. But the bodies have.
The tree and all its branches.
A behind schedule Amazon Prime delivery man, the woman at the bus stop with the brown knitted cap. god’s problem when she goes to therapy, in the mirror.
This resistance this flow the way the tenses blend together, the way the o rewrites as i, the innocence of lower-case letters. Divine has two I’s, sublime one i and you and i is I. is awillbecause/
The butterflies hold me, small and plastic.
We toys, as much
sing, as we can.
Since Ethan Stanton was six years old, he knew he had to be a writer. He has also always known that he had weird stuff in his head. It took the pressure cooker of pandemic parenting along with the explosion of Zoom classes for him to finally make the connection between those two things and start writing. His poetry, prose poetry, and flash fiction have been published in Vita Poetica, Dispatches from Quarantine, Amethyst Review, The Gravity of the Thing, and Brawl and featured in the Flash Fiction Forum curated reading series.
Instagram: @ethanstantonwrites
Facebook: ethan.stanton.779