Phantom Kangaroo

“String theory is an attempt to unite the two pillars of 20th century physics—quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity—with an overarching framework that can explain all of physical reality.”

— Live Science, Adam Mann

My love—a pulsing gravity
pulling your body back down
to mine on the ground.

Do not be afraid.
I have had practice.
I know how to braid

myself together with others,
their names and faces
the wax-coated thread

keeping me from going
too far over the licking
ridge of Lake Michigan,

where I last refused
to surrender.
Your ill-advised exposure

to my reverberating inoculations,
my thinly veiled promises
of answered questions

is more so what you should fear.
There are no revelations
for you here. I am the ellipsis.

I perpetually contrast and expand,
casting wave after wave out across
the long and convulted verse.

Rarely , am I giving
simple answers,
my love

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer, artivist, and cultural strategist. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the debut memoir about their carceral experiences A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). A voting member of the Recording Academy, Hicks is the recipient of grants, residencies, and fellowships from the Art for Justice Fund, the Texas After Violence Project, Black Mountain Institute, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Right of Return USA, and Tin House, among others. The winner of the 2020 Sappho Award from Palette Poetry, their poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Longreads, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Scalawag, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.

“[Q]uantum mechanics allows two or more particles to exist in…an entangled state. What happens to one of the particles in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other particle, even if they are far apart.”

— Press Release for the Nobel Prize in Physics,

Cotton Candy, Original Photography (2017)

Frequencies rush along the obscure stretch of my pliant continent. A bursting gamma-ray gone torrent,; in my hands it is a beginning. Once, I, the dawn, evaded foraging. My infinite bodies unsiphoned by the curiosities of mxn. The unsatiated desire of my species to possess my secrets—left split and spinning out in the density of the known verse; kept close the blued caulk rim of my wet purse, a shimmering dust sore to shine loose.

But I am, we are, the unwieldly remnants of stars. We sprang from this compact planet feral. Radically free. Naturally called into the watery beds of our known histories to fuse together our fragile bodies until we knocked nuclear.

I touch myself now and sense century after century of solar adaptations flickering through my cold and boundless night. Fashioned by fire, I know we could have been anything instead of obsessed with breaking down and splitting. So selfish, how often we give in to ourselves, succumb to the hunger of our own enigmatic flares, knowing we can never truly distance ourselves from The Other: the strange & unfamiliar.

We are all tethered. Why, on Earth, would we ever cede to borders? In our blood, the helix spins. Same as the planet spins. All around us the wheel, it turns. And still, we turn away from our mirrors? Our bodies, like other celestial bodies, rotate endlessly from sxn to soil to sun.

To forget our entangled lives is to make each of us unreal, realities unrecognized, thus unrepaired. So desperately, I reach into the glowing swell of my own waist—an unmeasurable absence warping the days and distances of our collective evolution—lose myself in my own inescapable gravity. Wade the mutable circumstances of my bright blackness, migrate its stretches of dark energy grown hefty, wide, and endless in the sphere of this jaundiced kiln, inside myself—our self—to find some alternate version of healed.

I know that if I can come, we can come together.

Faylita Hicks (she/they) is an Afro-Latinx writer, artivist, and cultural strategist. They are the author of HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, the forthcoming poetry collection A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), and the debut memoir about their carceral experiences A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2025). A voting member of the Recording Academy, Hicks is the recipient of grants, residencies, and fellowships from the Art for Justice Fund, the Texas After Violence Project, Black Mountain Institute, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Civil Rights Corps, Right of Return USA, and Tin House, among others. The winner of the 2020 Sappho Award from Palette Poetry, their poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Longreads, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Magazine, Scalawag, Slate, The Slowdown Podcast, Yale Review, amongst others.