Heat

Carlo Rovelli writes the difference 
between the past & the future exists 

only when there is heat. I like to watch 
your body in the present. It makes me 

know something about being here 
inside this one, bowl of hips both 

full & empty, a heat making tomorrow 
possible for me, though watching you 

& the dip of arm as bow against the violin 
of the other appendage—also arm—there 

is no sound but the heat slipping down
the body through breath.         Is sound 

a kind of heat? Sympathetic vibration 
across energy that, when dense, is matter? 

What is the matter, I want to ask? Do I 
want to ask? As it’s apparent in your body, 

at least in this moment, which isn’t the past 
or future. Do you want to burn? I once did, 

wanted to & also did, burning my way out 
of memories into a future I didn’t know 

was possible but longed for. Is longing a kind 
of heat? Rovelli writes that “in every case 

in which heat exchange does not occur…we see 
that the future behave exactly like the past.” 

When I push my hands against you, I’ll offer 
what can burn. When I step back, will you ignite  

me, please? I want to know what next is 
possible, what is possibly next; I imagine 

hearing some bell in an incendiary future 
we can only seem to sound our way toward.

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Laura McCullough most recent book of poems, Women & Other Hostages, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence press. Her other books include The Wild Night Dress, selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Contest, University of Arkansas Press, Jersey Mercy (BLP), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP) , Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press). She has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (Georgia University Press, 2015) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poems and prose have appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, and many other journals and magazines. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA where she teaches poetry and critical theory. Visit her at http://www.lauramccullough.org/.