All the scientists here are lonely.
This is a fact
unsupported by quantitative reasoning,
which makes all the scientists lonely.
The truth is not to be
trusted, even if it appears plain spoken.
We wander the aisles of super-stores,
with hearts less full than our carts.
Even the receipt is thermal
paper, and our fingertips wear
coats of BPA as we swipe
photos, messages, our lives
from right to left like small
time conductors.
Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat, a book of prose poems selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. Her chapbooks include: Purgatory (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014). She met her husband in the IU MFA program; together they have created the Rivertown Reading Series, Exit 7: A Journal of Literature and Art, and two awesome daughters. https://ameliamartens.com