[160 words]
The table exists whether I look or not –
or so the physicist claims, tapping the grain.
But light behaves like thought: wave, then particle,
depending on the gaze. What does that mean
for substance, for presence,
for the floor beneath our feet?
The chair casts a shadow. The shadow exists.
But does the truth reside in the chair,
or in the act of casting?
Every law we write bends under scrutiny,
not to break, but to slip –
like silk from a wrist, cold and exact.
Even atoms are mostly nothing.
Even time is theory wrapped in ritual.
The stars we see are already gone.
A mirror returns what it never owns.
We touch the surface of a world
that might be touching back – or not.
And yet we move, we eat, we die.
Reality, despite its riddles,
bruises the same.
The blade is not an idea.
The hunger is not a metaphor.
And still, nothing holds – but we hold on.
Alexander “Al” Scott Pearce Baker is a naturalist based in Nova Scotia. His fiction has appeared in Dark Harbor and Flash Phantoms, his poetry in The Lucky Lizard and Marrow Magazine, and his academic work with publishers including Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Bloomsbury.
