Robin Robinson is a queer multi-genre writer from Northern California. He received his BA in Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz. He is the playwright of Making Sense (2019) and Fishbrain & Frank (2023). His fiction and poetry have appeared in Beyond Queer Words, Lethe Press, and Chinquapin Literary Magazine.

This prose poem emerged from a long period of anxious depression, and the negative coping mechanisms I’d developed in response, including dissociation. I felt like an unreal collection of parts, selling my body and time for just above minimum wage. I was no longer a person along peoples. Who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to be doing became only screen burn-in.
In one sense, “superposition/bilateral split” is the dual fear of loneliness and being seen; the sensation of being alone and seeing yourself, realizing you are not singular nor truly solitary. Worse, these multitudinous segments of the self are failing to connect. No halves are equal, no taxonomy includes all items neatly. Living things don’t like being dissected.

Like John Ashbery’s “Litany”, this bifurcated poem is “to be read as simultaneous but independent monologues.” You could call them boyfriends.