Poetry

Between Words and Worlds

You know of quantum physics, right?
How everything is shifting and nothing
is solid as it appears. When you think
there’s something there, it disappears
as if you’re standing on the threshold
between words and worlds.

What if, passing through a door
from café to a sidewalk,
you fall upon your ear,
and plunge into an endless pit
of nothingness, for conviction, alone,
keeps the pavement there.

What if, like Tink in Peter Pan,
you’d need to say, believe,
believe, believe,
till the abyss
becomes a sleeve
that holds you in midair?

Leslie Smith Townsend

Leslie Smith Townsend is a poet, essayist, and memoirist whose work has been published in LEO, Journeys, The Louisville Review, Courier-Journal, Arable, Literary Mama, Christian Science Monitor, Friends Journal, Gyroscope Review, Metafore, and in the anthologies, Voices of Alcoholism, Show Me All Your Scars, and The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation. She is a graduate of Spalding University's MFA in writing program. Townsend has a Ph.D. in the psychology of religion and works as a licensed marriage and family therapist.

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