6.17 / Science and Fiction Issue

The Heaven on Earth Campaign

A beautiful girl at my gym has SCIENCE, all caps, in black, childish script,
tattooed between her hip bones. Someone else there is becoming female,
male-chested and still shaving her beard, her long silky blonde hair leads
the way like a vision. Einstein called quantum entanglement “spooky,”

that linking across space which keeps us from defining things separately.
This week, Gravity Probe B verified his theory: we’re caught in a net
and the mass of all objects, from fleas to black holes, warps space and time
as they fall inward toward a more massive object. I feel that sometimes when

I hear the Requiem in D minor, or hike the cliffs of Lake Superior, that falling
inward, away from myself. Dostoyevsky says We are all responsible to all for all.
The $50 million Anacostia trail project in Virginia is on hold until the osprey nest
on their construction crane empties, like St. Kevin of Glendalough when a blackbird

landed in his hand and built her nest while he was praying with arms outstretched.
He stayed through Lent, fed by her with nuts and berries, till the babies flew away.


Mary Buchinger’s poems have appeared in Booth Magazine, The Cortland Review, New Madrid, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Runes: A Literary Review, Slice, The Massachusetts Review, Versal, and other journals; her collection, Roomful of Sparrows, was a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices Series. She teaches writing and communication at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston.