This month, we offer: a dead short, voltage snapping closed. Next month we:

crush

Submission guidelines can be found here.

hindsight

I am reading articles about actions taken 40-60 years ago,
holding a red pen for marking. An atmospheric river rattles
the bay windows – when the pressure drops, it will break open
and ruin my white button-up,
marking it bloody as that near-universal flag:
You shouldn’t have given up.
I wish the path between two points
wasn’t always a line. The professor corrects me:
No, it isn’t. It can be longer. Whatever.
I’m not changing my answer. I wish
we were firmly past the getting through
and on to the getting over. Water, too,
moves circuitous, wiggles its way
down the hillside – both the path of least
resistance, and the long way around.
Circuitous in the most literal sense
of the word – a circuit shorting,
a dead short, voltage snapping closed
to finish the loop. voltage, too, is just electric &
potential: the feeling you get before
a heavy object falls.

When the sky cracks open and carves a new
river right down the center of the valley,
my body, caught between fight and flight,
splits the difference – tells me if I hold still enough,
the storm will pass over and through me
and never touch me at all.

Ishani Cheshire is a poet based out of San Jose, California and a recent winner of the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in Poetry. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley with BAs in Physics and Astrophysics, and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Data Science while serving as a teaching assistant for a course on stellar physics.