DELPHI, by Lindsay Remee Ahl

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

DELPHI is an excerpt from a longer manuscript called If a Dolphin. I was doing research on WWII, and I found the physics of that time particularly interesting. In 1938, when physicists first discovered fission, a paradigm shift happened—their understanding of how the world worked was reconceived. In science, the world often looks orderly—there are physical laws that usually remain in place, there are designs that are predictable, but fission revealed that that built into the atom itself was a randomness, an instability. It was at this time that Einstein and Bohr argued about how physical reality was structured and Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” to which Bohr answered, “How do you know?” That seed of instability in the atom signaled a seed of chaos in the workings of the universe. That paradox that we all experience—a mix of order and chaos—inspired these poems.

Reality is often not as it seems. These poems are about a drowned girl who learns to swim, who travels after she dies, or after she comes back alive. They are about WWII, one of the reasons we pushed forward in fission research, and they are about the aftermath of loss, or failure, or losing something or someone who “shouldn’t” have been lost or who “should have” been saved.

What is literally true is different from what is emotionally true: we are all traveling in time, burdened with our collective and personal history, with chance and violence. Inside our choices we have great agency, but we are all subject to what appears to be random events.

In trying to get closer to understanding things it can feel like one of Zeno’s paradoxes: when you get half-way there, you still have to get half-way there. On the other hand, it’s also true that the shortest distance between two points is realizing they are the same.

Lindsay Remee Ahl is the author of Desire, (Coffee House Press) which was nominated for a Discover New Writer’s Award and a Ruth Lily Award. Desire earned her a Fletcher Fellow to the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She has fiction and poetry published in BOMB Magazine, The Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, The Massachusetts Review, Fiction Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, and many others. She has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. She runs shadowgraf.com, an Arts and Culture Magazine. She has worked in the arts as a photographer, a filmmaker, a painter, and in publishing. Her website: https://www.lindsayahl.com/.