Jim Redmond

The Master Algorithm

When God retracted His retractable
parts, the universe was,
by way of this mechanism,
little darkling begat,
and in its begotten something left 
of His light fixtured
for the first time, 
raw information
outside the Godspace,
13.799 ± 0.021 billion earth years ago, 
the light was pure data
but also the gnosis thereof, 
shot out and out and out,
forever, amen.
In the beginning, the primary voice 
command saying, let there be, 
and ever since then, 
the light connecting 
all things to be 
known with His unknowable 
AND, OR, and NOT.

Jim Redmond received his MFA from the University of Michigan and his PhD in poetry from the University of North Texas. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, PANK, and Sixth Finch, among others. His chapbook, Shirts or Skins, won Heavy Feather Review's 2013 chapbook prize. A full-length collection, Get Back to Work, will be published by Schism Press in 2021.