Kenton K. Yee
Kenton K. Yee has placed poems in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, I-70, RHINO, Quarterly West, Plume Poetry, Indianapolis, Slipstream, Scientific American, and Rattle, among others. Kenton holds a PhD in theoretical physics from UCLA, law and business degrees from Stanford, and taught at Columbia University. He writes from Northern California.
AVOGADRO’S NUMBER
It’s 10 or 11 o’clock and I’m an eyeball
looking through a telescope—a telescope—
while lightning bolts telescope between
my eyes and mind as I stare at the yellow
and white dots that are suns or galaxies
but could be starships or fireflies. One
is a whorl, not the Milky Way but so like it
I could be looking into a rear-view mirror
at the retreating past, a time of sidewalk
gardens of orange butts, grocery bags,
bottle fragments, freshman handouts, new-
found freedom to drink lattes all night,
test tubes, Amedeo Avogadro, Count
of Quaregna and Cerreto, the algebra of
his moles blocking my path to med school.
Why the hell do I find galaxies so much
more interesting than bodies when
I am a body, a body of 30 trillion cells—
300 times as many as stars in the Milky
Way and yet 200 billion times fewer
than necessary for a mole? And why does
new year’s fall in winter and not spring?
