Boltzmann Brain/Alter
by Kari Flickinger, 3.24am March 10th 2021
Boltzmann Brain, 1.42
The word whorls faster than gravity. A willing cigar
floods the airwaves. The headlines
clamor for a minute with the brain as she appears—a glimmering.
She begins to tell the microphone—well
pendulous… as if from the arc of the rocket, what
she remembers, holding out her hands
to show—no hands, no sleight—possible in
her
hands!?
But she tries to look at her hands. She remembers
a stylized weight of convergence—tectonics formed an “m” along her
palms, in reaching for
the constellation—flecks on her wrists. But she has no hands to see. How
plucked her eyes must be
from here! She tries to catch
her breath
in her throat. See the exhalation.
She has no space
suit it must be. Her body-memory dissipates in an ether she knows exists
but cannot conceive of. These constructs fizzle in the compacted
waves of space.
Boltzmann Brain, 1.37
First, I remembered
remembering, and the category of prime. Premiere. Second.
I remembered my body.
My fingers had these light
spots. Freckles. I remembered
the word freckles.
Thought
of a baby doe in a cartoon movie?
I saw when I was a child.
I had been a child. I had little chubby knees, then. I wasn’t good
at standing. Knees. I thunked hard and slammed my head
against a fireplace. The fire
place had been in a white room. The sun
struck
through harsh at the same time every afternoon. I remember
touching the wood of the deck. The grain
and routes of their travels. I speak hello to the trees. The gum
at the news
stand. Walk
up and down hills. I am sure hills become more difficult. The tallness
gorging the thick muscle sinew. Swell and contract. A vellum.
A cataract. A mountain with sharp edges. I sat in traffic
on a mountain in a car
full of women who each told stories of love.
It felt like each magnified the pleasure to you, then.
You
thought about how you
would shudder at his touch. How
his hair ran along his back like a cascade. How he stole
distortions of your smile, snippets of your tales, grew tall
inside his mouth—hyperbolic
an inflation of meaning
under your dresses
his hand, his legs for the club some
times you would turn all of the women into birds, before you
all went dancing. The glitter vivid plum sun
-flower along their eye
lids, heads. Little vines
on your own
cheek. A tree was all hips.
The next one was hips, too. And the next
wouldn’t dance at all. You think of the time you remember you
walked around in the startling rain.
Like gunshots. You watched the sky. You remember flying.
You remember being a shell. You scoured the salt for a home.
You remember
what dust, and where
dust flew from. You remember?
Boltzmann Alter, 1.4 [Additionally extracted from Brain 1.37]
I am Jack’s lateral hypothalamus, I whisper to the man, I think
is sitting on the functional corporate artwork—a concrete slab
beside me. Boomers shake their bodies
defiantly in the stale summer air to a snarling 70’s cover-band.
The beer in my belly hums to a tune I cannot quite
decipher. The chords multipurposed. Words garbled. I pretend
lyrics into the atmosphere where the halls of the vocal cords
are crystalline constructions.
Wolf howls and I sway round. The light flickers. An orange all around
us—the sun crouches below Mount Diablo.
Later, I watch a video that tells me he may have been
both beside me and not quite. Both. An ego of Schrodinger. Alive
and not.
A projected creature hooks me from the materia of my make
up. The gull wings slide from the creases of my smile. O gods
I have been building companions, again.