“The First Gust of Special Relativity is Weightlessness”

by Alina Stefanescu

Did it begin 

when Einstein watched men

wash windows on tall buildings

&  imagined how falling felt?

The theorist borrows a silhouette's terror

to build his edifice. 

The sun is a man with big hands 

on the couch 

and the sky is his

origin. There is no duo

to local velocity. 

I write to you

from the Icarus 

in each of us, from the word 

for existing 

between aboveness 

and asphalt.

I mean light on the pillow hisses when bussed 

by a fan blade. 

I mean fog is how clouds tongue 

the ground.

The losing comes later, a night with no 

windows, the stained cup of 

lightspeed 

you left 

on the floor, 

all energy and mass, interchangeable—

Did it begin when 

the sun became a man

abandoning the idea

of distance

in a bed. The specificity of

sex with insignificant others

in a masochistic 

nocturne. 

I write to you 

from the sadist's secret

fretwork.

I have fallen 

to know 

how falling felt

& nothing grew from it. 

I have measured acceleration 

in altering tempo, 

the speed at which 

time expands when 

you leave 

me alone

there is nothing 

worth keeping

forever.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.