The Light Within Earshot at the Gas Station Snack Bar

Our oldest light goes by the name cosmic microwave background radiation— CMB for short. She's everywhere: fluorescent birdsong of modern offices, hum of corner store ice cream cases. Have you heard of her? This gal was born screaming into freedom from the expansion of a bang so big we're still talking about it. Expelled from the recombination's gender- less cervix, before there were names for things like body, or heat, or quiet. She slid through the pitch of first dark, not yet sure what edges were, dragging the weight of a beginning behind, shelter for and shedding of photons loosened from a fire she didn't start. Somewhere in this thirteen-billion-year drift her lips kissed the eyelids of stars that hadn’t learned to die yet, passed the chubby fists of planets still cooling in their cribs. Fell into gravity wells, bent her spine around a gape of black holes, and climbed back up again, tired but full. We call her background now, like she's an afterthought, the hum of hums beneath the humming—we call her 'it'. Add a T to her beginning and we might as well call her mother. And when she reaches us, frail and stretched thin, we catch her in our instruments (where we found her), our desperate, outstretched hands. For our effort, like a good genie enduring a bad rub, she tells the story of our origin from a certain point— then distracts us with tricks when we ask her about the end of it.