Poem of the Week | June 01, 2026

Patricia Caspers is the founding editor-in-chief of West Trestle Review. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently The Most Kissed Woman in the World. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Mills College (RIP), and her award-winning work has appeared widely in journals such as Ploughshares, Pithead Chapel, and Cimarron. She is a Unitarian Universalist.  

“Daughter of a Dead Addict Considers Schrödinger’s Father” by Patricia Caspers is our Poem of the Week.

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Daughter of a Dead Addict Considers Schrödinger’s Father 

                                        The world is given to me only once –Erwin Schrödinger  
 
That Christmas Eve there was perhaps 
an hour when, like the famous cat 
—calico, tabby, tuxedo?— 
Schrödinger’s father was dead. Rudolf  
in a state of superimposition as his son,  
oblivious, sang “Stille Nacht” with the choir.  
 
Like Schrödinger’s cat, my father, 
those years he cranked his heart, 
those years we didn’t speak. 
Later, the hours between crash 
and the phone’s incessant ring.  
 
If news of my father never traveled,  
I might believe him  
still out there, dancing his Cadillac hustle,  
making sweet cake of stale end pieces. 
 
Schrödinger’s famous feline existed 
only as thought experiment—a fashionable 
way to say Erwin told a story about a cat 
to mock other physicists. Whether  
or not we look in that box, goes the moral, 
our fathers are dead. 
 
I turned to physics to know  
where my father had gone— 
scattered among corollas and constellations? 
How like us to remember a man best  
by the lie we told ourselves. 

***

Author’s Note

I’ve never studied physics, but I’ve heard many Schrödinger jokes. I always assumed—like most people, maybe—that Schrödinger’s cat was a genuine experiment. After my dad died in a car wreck, I thought about how our relationship was mostly long-distance—so much so that in my dreams about my dad, we’re usually talking on the phone—and sometimes we lost contact for months or years. When he died, I wasn’t in touch with anyone else in our family, and at some point I realized that if no one had called to tell me, I might even now, eighteen years later, believe that my dad was still alive and on a really extended bender. Is this what Schrödinger meant by superimposition? I wanted to find out. When I learned that Schrödinger’s father died on Christmas Eve and that the cat experiment was a joke, this poem came together. My dad was a jokester, too.