HERE COMES SUSY

by Marilyn Peretti

Large Hadron Collider Gears Up to Go Beyond Boundaries of Human Understanding —Newsweek headline, April 7, 2015

Have you been looking for your gluino
to glue your quarks together,
or have you hoped for a tiny photino
for your particle of light, the photon?

Or if you’re shopping for a squark
to partner with your darling quark—
building blocks of your lovely atoms’
minute protons and neutrons—

you’ve come to the right place,
to the monster Large Hadron Collider
which will be spinning even faster,
having taken two short years of rest after

rushing in circles to collide particles,
smashing out brand new ones—
as predicted by Mr. Higgs—
decaying into little fermions,

particles of matter, and the bosons
which convey a lotta force.
Ah, we’re getting closer to dark matter.
But does it matter? Do we really need

to understand what binds the galaxies
together in the skies?
Just as we found antimatter,
next comes supersymmetric matter.

Now, doubling its collision energy
supersymmetry, or Susy, will fill in gaps,
showing each particle to have
much more massive partners:

the photon’s photino,
the quark’s squark,
the gluon’s gluino,
and dark matter’s neutralino.

Until then, I think I’ll take a nap.


Marilyn Peretti writes with Chicago’s west suburban poets. She has published Let Wings Take You, To Remember-To Hope, Lichen-Poems of Nature and Angel’s Wings. Her poems have been published in Talking River, Fox Cry Review, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, California Quarterly, PoetrySky, Kyoto Journal and others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize.

FOR THE 2013 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

by Eric A. Weil

Neutrino, quark, lepton, superstring;
The “God Particle” is a Theory of Everything.

Some physicists used the Large Hadron Collider
To make Einstein’s theories just a bit tidier.

Infinitesimally smaller than infinitesimal,
The boson named Higgs flies faintly recognizimal;

So now that we know Higgs bosons exist,
The question remains:  Of what do they consist?


Eric A. Weil teaches at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.  He has two chapbooks:  A Horse at the Hirshhorn (Finishing Line, 2002) and Returning from Mars (Main Street Rag, 2009).