Rodger LeGrand

Singularity

The first star mattered only to the second star, and then it was gone. The second star mattered only to the first star, and then it was alone. After the Big Bang flare exhaled to a hiss from its singularity, everything fell dark again as the dust motes drifted. The only hints of change were virtual particles playing their games with antimatter, as they always had—always will. The difference is in the before, spacetime didn’t exist. There was only the void, and in the void, self-annihilation. No time. No aging. No loss. No stars forming. No first kisses. No dancing. In the after, everything expanded, more and more distant. Growing apart is a breath that never fills the lungs.

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Song

Can’t we just let the song play, she said, and dance through the end. Part of her feels like she let go of him before they ever met, like their meeting was fate’s way of announcing that the world isn’t perfect and that’s just something to accept. There’s another part of her that feels if she had never met him she would have felt his absence, a nagging pull like the back of the brain taptaptap of having left the oven on even when she hasn’t used the oven in months.

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Empty

Before even the earliest days of the universe, everything was nothing and nothing was everything. A vacuum of emptiness, a nothing as a pure as could be, and that pureness, before the Big Bang, was everything. Quantum filed mechanics. Even in nothingness virtual particles flecked into existence, spots of nothing dotted the tapestry of nothing, and their opposites, antiparticles also emerged in nothingness, flares that danced this way, a pop and spring into the void and pinched out, something from nothing and back again, a question about loneliness, the negation of each the other in bursts of nano-explosions, tiny needles pricking into a lifeless heart. 

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Tingles

The newness tingles the belly. First kiss. Endless possibilities origamied into existence, if only for an instant. She’s reminded of the time they met unexpectedly at the grocery store, him with pears in his carry basket and her with peanut butter, jelly, bread, and pads in her cart. There are moments when everything seems possible, when just a glance can make all the tediousness of the day fade, the way pain medication pulls the bite out of a broken tooth—pain is still there, but we care about it less. 

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Warmth

A hint of warmth for the first time since time began and that lasted for only a quick second. When the Big Bang released its explosion of molecules, swirls of colorful gas clouds in pockets of helium and hydrogen, heat curled in hazy waves around particles in spotty darkness upon which streams of violet, turquoise, and fuchsia that extended out like fingers searching for a hand to hold, which lit the canopy of blackness and showed nothing but more darkness.

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Clichéd

The couch. Again. Netflix and chill—with the cat. Again. If there weren’t a pandemic, she’s sure she wouldn’t be alone, even though she felt alone before the pandemic started even when he was there. Sometimes the distance is in the touch. He could have called, she thinks. He could have said that it doesn’t matter what happened, and that she isn’t going through this alone. Maybe she should just call him. Reach out. Be the bigger person, as they say. Connect. Maybe say she’s sorry—and mean it this time. Or, maybe enough of Netflix and she should see what’s on Prime. 

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Drift

The drifting continued for millennia. The coziness of the pre-Big Bang womb followed by the clock of heat that ticked through molecules to their neutrons, continued residually for millennia as they formed gasses and clouds, became dense enough to pull gravity. And the clouds packed tighter, holding onto themselves, their atomic memory of fetal seed bed compressed oneness. One instance, singular, no difference between electrons or protons or hydrogen or oxygen or me or you. Everything and all things one thing and one thing nothing or everything that mattered or anti-mattered.

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Found

Over time molecules began to find each other again. Hydrogen atoms began to collect around other hydrogen atoms. Large groups of helium joined in. Oxygen. The cooling effect of time, a new construct, led them to find each other, to huddle together in their soupy clouds to stay warm. And even when packed together still there was space for virtual particles to continue their snap into and pirouette out of existence with corresponding anti-particles, the universe’s second hand ticking before time and during and one day after. Micro Big Bangs. Nano Big Bangs. Each the bursting possibility of spacetime, again and again spacetime, again and again hope, connection.

**

Seen

She saw herself in his eyes and wished she could only see his eyelids. It’s hard to work on ourselves, but she tries. Forces a laugh when a smile might do. Harder when Zoom is the COVID sounding board for socializing, and she isn’t social anyway and would rather zoom to the other side of the universe than keep trying to be something that doesn’t make sense.

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Rodger LeGrand has been nominated for the Pushcart twice, and is the author of several collections of poetry, including Bells, (Finishing Line Press 2025), Studies for a Self-Portrait (Big Table 2019) and Two Thirds Water (Flutter Press 2018). Next year, his short story collection titled Ashes (2026) will be published by Finishing Line Press. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Ravens Perch, Evening Street Review, The Cortland Review, and the Boston Literary Magazine. He has taught writing at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he designs curriculum for humanitarian courses for the United Nations and international NGOs at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.