Multiverse

She touches a hand to my belly and tells me that I will learn something new about love. It’s another dimension, she says. We are in a bar where everyone is downing beer, and I thirst for the cold familiar taste of summer. There is still snow on the ground. Everyone has started early; I feel doubly stalled. Recently, you told me that physicists believe our world is only one possibility. That elsewhere, on another planet, another universe, another dimension, exists every other possibility imaginable. When we die, our consciousness bifurcates and jumps from here to there. We’re immortal, you said, awed. The baby moves. After seven months, I’ve come to know how it turns restlessly at night or jigs in the morning after coffee. There is, for now, only one possibility—each motion you’ve put in me singular and unrepeatable.

____

After My Husband Leaves Us

And after days of rain, it suddenly stops and we peer out the window, watch the grey lift. Across the street, someone from the city has set up around an old stump. The grinder whirs away as chips spit out, amass into a velvet pile. My son, who has learned to climb, clambers onto a stool and briefly plays the radiator like a piano. On tiptoes he regards the man in goggles, the slow work of shredding years and smoothing out land. Damp grass encircles an open wound. When he was just learning to crawl, my son and I sat on the kitchen floor counting knots in the wood. Now it’s just the two of us, each on two feet: one startled by how swift and brute the uprooting, another contemplating how to fly.