MiPOesias Magazine

Steven D. Schroeder edits The Eleventh Muse literary journal for Poetry West and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The National Poetry Review (where he won the Laureate Prize), 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

Quantum Topology

Coffee cup equals donut equals rubber band,
a single torus flexible as muscle,
but also the Big Bang's pinpoint
and a universe of punched stars and wormholes

A binocular telescope frame the same
as a gallows when the trapdoor opening contracts
the noose's loop, torus twisted
not yet into infinity but into its symbol

The remains of the hanging victim a lens: cold
on the eye, transparent, impassable
as outer space without a hermetic apparatus,
admitting no particles or crime

No, the body a rock, collapsed
shell around a neutron star core, a porous block
whose surface leaks live particles
from the black hole that craves the universe

Penultimate Taunt

I spearhead sneak attacks,
and you're a gate unmanned.
No safety belt, I'm shots of whiskey

you slug before you slide behind
the wheel, the final whisker
of weight that tips your boat

atop a waterfall, the risk
you run but never beat:
complete humiliation.

If you're a king, then I'm checkmate
in two. You're a curvaceous
span of swanlike neck

I tie in knots, a glacier
whose ice flows one direction—back,
not forth—an egg that cracks

jokes in the snake. Your wick
almost out of wax,
you're a lit candle in my hand.