swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

fact or fabrication?
Sam Levy

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Thanatosis

The body, foreign
from the I. Who then?
With hands
as unworked as these, with
hips that work
this hard. They are not numb,
the limbs that scampered and lips
that bowed.
They are dead.

We are all dead—these pieces
of person. But so is space.
So are the atoms that delineate shapes,
each one a star that no longer
sparks. Those particles of the body
and the negative space
orbiting them
can no longer be defined.

Even the dimensions collapse into
paper-thin plains that pull, tied
to the string of any thought
that’s left.

Dead or dreaming now?
And history—fact or
fabrication?
This disassembling
of artefacts, this deconstruction
of materials,
rips away
past and present alike.

But transcendence necessitates annihilation.

So what remains? Void
and vacuum, absence
and abyss.

Then the space
to return. Or perhaps
to begin.

The real resets, more
real for having been offline.
The curtain that blocked out the stars
is pulled back, their sheen less
gritty than before, injected
with fresh hydrogen.

Memories take back
their status, and form is
restored. Momentum of
motion regains its hold
on the moment.

Recalling time, spent and
unspent, is a new kind of eruption.
Remembering becomes discovering
what it is to be
a living thing.

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Sam Levy is a freelance writer and editor living in Austin, Texas. She received a Master of Liberal Arts with a thesis in poetry writing from St. Edward’s University in 2016 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University in 2023. Her poetry has appeared in Gemini Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, The Bond Street Review, The Art of Everyone, Alternate Route, and BarBar, and her fiction has appeared in Fiction on the Web and BarBar.