When the path forks ahead

If it doesn’t now, in the multiverse,
your neighborhood burns
from draught.
Flies crawl
inside the glass.

A cold hand on your
neck, an empty crib
in a room
you leave locked.

There is silence in which your heart
races and silence
where it sits
dead as a sandbag.

Find out how much silence one room can hold.
How that number increases in proportion
to the size of the family.

Thus, I say, take hold.
A brass doorknob.
A chair arm.
The window frame.

It is,
there.
Real.

Our rarity listed
in the catalog
of quantum places.

Let’s buy tickets.

The wait is long, but
the show rewards.

Andrew Najberg is the author of the collection of poems The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and the chapbook of poems Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press 2007). His poems have appeared in dozens of journals online and in print, including North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Good River Review. His short fiction has appeared in Fleas on the Dog, The Wondrous Real, Psychopomp Magazine, Bookends Review, and the Colored Lens, and it is forthcoming in Utopia Science Fiction, Symposeum, and Prose Online. An AWP Intro award recipient and the 2022 National Poetry Month Brain Mills Press grand prize winner, he received an MFA in poetry from Spalding University and an MA in creative writing from University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Currently, he teaches for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.