A Manual For Assembling An Unfinished Universe Poem by Avery Koplin

Take a handful of hydrogen (no, too much, throw some back)
compress it—no, collapse it—
watch it fight, screaming fusion into itself,
until it spits out light, heat, gold, cold, regret.

Now fold the edges of spacetime.
No, sharper. Sharper!
Tighter, until gravity leaks out like marrowmush from cracked bone,
thicker in some places, thin as a lie in others.

Scatter the dust. Let it fester.
Clump it into spheres, into jagged-edged anomalies,
let some catch fire, let others freeze in their own silence.
Ignore the ones that go rogue—
they were mistakes anyway.

Who spilled the antimatter?
Who left entropy unsupervised?
It's eating the corners of the blueprint again,
chewing time into something soft, unrecognizable.

And what is this gray static between dimensions,
this hum that writhes in the gaps of equations?
It shouldn't be there.
It shouldn't be anything.
But it's listening.

Quick, spin everything faster—
too fast—
slow it down—
too slow!
(Who decided 'orbits' were a good idea?)

A dark smear at the edge.
A rupture! A throat swallowing backwards.
Don't look too long.
It will look back.

Nothing makes sense anymore—
Did it ever?
The instructions are smudged, the particles refuse to behave,
space stretches and stretches and stretches and never snaps.

Maybe it (not the universe) was never meant to be finished.
Maybe it (definitely not the universe) was never meant to start.