Jessica Lee McMillan

Principally Uncertain

I appear before you as coincidental limbs

mustered by a furnace

of shifting plates,

gravitate into a thought,

a membrane of feeling,

a vanishing point in the mountains.

How can the mind measure

place or proximity

unbeguiled by momentum?

A planet disappears in a blink.

Eyes shut,

powers of ten inside.

The self accumulates in plain sight

but only as a friction.

As true as disappearing.

I have to fade for the universe to run its fingers

through me, a mathematical inequality,

an essential limit.

What you see

when you see me

is an outline cast by the sun,

mercurial matter.

I dissolve in its spit-fire

burning love.

---

Jessica Lee McMillan is a poet and teacher with an English MA and creative writing certificate from SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. Her recent work can be read in The Malahat Review, QWERTY, Crab Creek Review, and Pinhole Poetry. Jessica lives in New Westminster, BC with her little family and large dog.