Theory of Relativity, by Emma Miao

Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket, by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (USA) 1875

Theory of Relativity
​
There is a flurry of wind as the world 
becomes a metaphor. Are you listening? 
The way the sky slopes in, waiting for 
its breaking point. Chalk leather seat, 
static fuel blooming in the valley. All  
that time, I was imagining the fracturing 
feathering of a heart detached from gravity. 
I knew back then—how Earth’s acerbic thrum 
rocks an engine; how weathered glass arches 
against my fingertips like flame in a tornado. 
Here’s a secret: we don’t know silence 
until it’s injected into the void, choked and 
gasping. It’s lonely here, like my room,
gaping and stickered with stars. How ten 
thousand miles an hour feels like nothing. 
How thirty years feels like nothing. 
Life flashes before my eyes in the 
vortex between dreams and reality.
Pressure plasters my chest like a slab. 
This rocket punctures the clouds like a bullet, 
salient enough to leave an exit wound. It’s a 
precarious peace: synchronously racing and 
loitering. A precarious peace: this barren home.

Emma Miao

Emma Miao is a Chinese-Canadian poet from Vancouver, BC. Her poems appear in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Emerson Review, Rising Phoenix Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. The winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest 2020, Emma is a Commended Foyle Young Poet 2019, a COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Fellow, and an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Her poetry and piano album, Oscillation, is forthcoming this winter. Find her at emmamiao.weebly.com.