Self Portrait as an Electron Cloud, by Dagne Forrest

Self Portrait as an Electron Cloud
                             
I once believed if I lost my keys and arrived home to a locked door, I could simply slip through its layers, the way Ernest Rutherford once feared he would slip right through the floorboards beneath his bed the morning after discovering that an atom is composed of mostly empty space. Thin girl insinuating briskly through the smallest crack, like a sharp breath. This risks sounding as though I thought this page or life could be entered so easily and isn’t the ultimate locked room mystery we know it to be. Finding my way in is just harder these days, my head rippling and folding with repeated attempts. The relief in learning that electrons act more like a cloud of overlapping energy states. No wonder just existing takes so much, this constant fizzing spreading, like a goalkeeper trying to be in all corners of the net at once. Everyone must see -- this mind butter-on-toast-thin, its static ever louder in ways I can’t explain to anyone who could help. There are only so many things one person can be and yet I’m still grieved by all I should. Hand on door, the electrons in each of us press fervently against the other, skin and particle board, an invisible shift somehow chaste and ardent, subtly deforming and reforming our shapes in the process. This effect magnified exponentially between living things, say two human beings. I could end here.

Dagne Forrest 

This piece was inspired by Head of Paula Eyles, by Frank Auerbach (Britain, b. Germany) 1972.
https://www.artnet.com/artists/frank-auerbach/head-of-paula-eyles-udzojzxJvzGqpmzgygJjyQ2

Dagne Forrest is a Canadian poet. In 2021 she was included in Canada’s Poem in Your Pocket campaign. Her work has appeared in december magazine, Rust + Moth, Lake Effect, SWWIM Every Day, Prism International, Whale Road Review, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. She belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s senior editorial and podcast teams. Her debut chapbook will be published by Baseline Press in 2025.