Stephen Kampa

17 Fundamental Particles

Now the world’s awash     in particles, but back when     I was green, there were
just three, your basic     subatomic trinity,     one more than complete
enough to explain     your major interactions.     These new ones have names

straight out of science     fiction: gluons, muons, strange     and charm quarks, and sure,
I love to roll them     around on my tongue, to feel     their particular
gobstopper musics,     yet I can’t drown out the doubt     (or no-duh no-doubt)

they’re multiplying     like bad pun-based cover bands.     Listen, the list of
theoretical     thingummies predicted by     supersymmetries
includes some doozies:      slepton, sneutrino, wino,     zino, chargino,

something called a squark—     I want to holler, “Stop, squark!”     except a stop squark
is a predicted     particle, too. You might think     peer reviewing per-
plexicalities     is what physicists do when     they have no clue what

to do, that maybe     dilaton and notaton     serve as placeholders
in a universe     that remains mostly empty     space. What space cadet,
what bozo, faces     a Higgs boson unbequalmed?     Sometimes I believe

quasiparticles—     saxion, for example,     or exciton—prove
as persuasive as     pyrotron, which one cocky     crackpot concocted 
to demystify     cases of spontaneous     human combustion,

which also doesn’t     exist. What kind of nebbish,    what nerd, doesn’t want
more exciton in     his life? Who is miffed to learn     axions were named
after a common     brand of laundry detergent?     As Sam Arbesman

puts it, in childhood     we name our stuffed animals,     and in adulthood,
we name “our species,     chemical elements,     asteroids, and cities,”
whereby we formulate     “an order to      an otherwise chaotic

and frightening world.”     I say let the naming con     tinue: call them taus,
tachyons, kobolds,     sprites, spirits, souls, anything     you want—I’ve seen them
all with the exact     same frequency. I don’t mind     giving charming tags

to intangibles,     I don’t mind rebranding what     we can’t comprehend.
Just remember this:     for over a century,     because combustion
couldn’t be explained,     we had an element called     phlogiston that burned

brightly as any,     and then it went up in smoke:     now it’s as gone as
the twenty you thought     you still had in your old man’s     wallet, but which you 
burned through at the bar     last night. Now it doesn’t matter     what you call it.

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Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), Articulate as Rain (2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (2023). His work has appeared in Red Ogre Review, Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in Best American Poetry 2018 and Best American Poetry 2024. During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House. He teaches at Flagler College.