Erwin Schrödinger Speaks on Dead Fathers

hypothesis: a father’s funeral, unattended, is only a gathering

of bodies. agitated particles confined to a space. maybe grief
is liquid. consider, liquids take on the shape of the container
in which they are placed. the church is flooded with tears,
sunday best drenched in salt, all the light refracted
stained-glass blue.

hypothesis: a closed casket funeral bears the chance of resurrection. if you

seal any animal in a box with the word death, they maintain an infinite
capacity for survival. i have never killed an animal, but i dream
in a language of their bones, black soil & spill of corpses, chalk white,
a field of blurred equations.

hypothesis: any child who has named their father in the hard mathematics of

gravestones knows the body’s infinite potential for decay. maybe if
you blink at the right moment, death is only waveform collapse.

experiment: take your father’s potential for disease, wicked inheritance,

call this radioactive isotope. when you open a bottle do you
hear his voice? when you open a bottle is he casketed inside?

By torrin a. greathouse

Biography:

torrin a. greathouse is a genderqueer, schizophrenic, cripple-punk from Southern California. They are the Editor and Co-Founder of Black Napkin Press. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in 3Elements Review, Assaracus, Heavy Feather Review, FreezeRay Poetry, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Polychrome Ink, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, The Thought Erotic, Emerge Literary Journal, & The Feminist Wire. torrin’s work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Rust + Moth. When they are not writing or editing poetry, they are trying to survive in america long enough to earn a degree.