geometry
my neighbor’s trash cans are lined up at
attention ours cluster like children
at a bus stop you can tell a lot
from the position of things a rabbi
once said if you find three coins
lying flat on the ground you may conclude
they have been dropped and keep them but
if they are stacked you know the owner
has arranged them and is planning to return
in this case you may not touch the coins
an ark perched on sawhorses is
an insurance policy an ark floating
on the ocean is a prison an ark
colliding with the side of a mountain
is a possibility a maybe
when my dog lies with all four feet
in the air his spine a joyful S I know
he has given himself to the state
of sleep like a present the way
in first love you say here have me
conversely my husband once explained
that the reason he leaves all the cabinets
in the kitchen open is because as soon as
he gets the thing he needs the cabinet
doesn’t exist for him anymore
valentine
daddy doesn’t hate you i
assure the dog even though
he says so believe me
i rely on this as i do on other
possible non-truths like the way
i’m leaving you has
an unvoiced but not now hanging
in brackets after it like a picture on the wall
when we were dating my husband said i
was at best a 6 out of 10 but his hands
kept bumping into me like pigeons
at a window any
declaration is a Polaroid nothing
but a snapshot of right now
by the time the picture develops that
particular right now is over so
if i love you is just something
written with a sparkler on night air
then i hate you is steam rising
from a grate something under
your feet made that steam
but that something is barreling
away on tracks while you’re walking
in the opposite direction and now
both it and you are someplace else
once my husband got me a Valentine
with a T Rex on the front stretching
its alligator arms with a cartoon bubble
above it that said “i love you
this much!” then
when you opened up the card
the inside said (“it’s more
than it looks like”) and
it is more i mean
and less and less and
sometimes more
really this is in fact a political poem
my mom rabbit-punched with her second
knuckle out like hammering a tack
into your low rib the first three
were ok but by the tenth it hurt
then you had a choice
keep sitting or say stop
if you said stop she added vocals:
“you’re so hysterical Dor everything
makes you so hysterical you
should see a doc and get some pills
so you aren’t so hysterical hysterical
hysterical” which brings us
to the present political moment
which also features a bully who wants
you to know that no matter what
you do you’ll get bruised ribs
because that’s the point
that any choice is no choice
if you sit still he’ll punch harder
if you try to leave the table
you’ve got no place to go
what the bully wants
is for you to feel hopeless but keep
hoping and make some stupid move
instead you have to decide
it’s always going to hurt
and work from there
around the grade school lunch table
would you rather be blind or deaf
and the genius among us said either
as long as i could still eat pizza
none of us had seen a tragedy yet but still
we posed disasters to each other – what
if you were stuck on a desert island –
and stupid loophole answers:
i would wish for more wishes!
we were like the tadpoles trapped
on the classroom windowsills we had the end
of fins and the start of legs but neither
were getting us out of these Mason jars
just yet so we conjured impossible travels what if
you were in a submarine stuck on the bottom
of the ocean what if your rocket ran out
of jet fuel and you couldn’t ever
get home at the end of the school year
the tadpoles had shrunk away
into peeper frogs the size
of pencil erasers and we wrote
reports about how all the shimmering
liquid parts of them had
disappeared
You have been told, O mortal, what is good,
and what the LORD requires of you
--Micah 6:8
if you had done better my father
said, kneeling so he could eye
my eyes, this wouldn’t have happened
meaning my mother wouldn’t have
gotten drunk or psychotic whichever
it was that night this was the summer
the plane crashed, if you can believe it,
leaving the boys across the street
orphaned by somebody’s dumb mistake
so I started doing math making tiny
circles on my bottom lip with my finger
ten to the right then ten to the left
erasing them a type of perfect
symmetry meant, though I couldn’t
say so then, to keep the world in balance
in those days there was a produce
man at the grocery store who weighed
your grapes on a scale suspended
from the ceiling and if the person
buying grapes said two pounds and it
was a little over two pounds
he broke one off and ate it quieting
the trembling red pointer the way
somebody might pet a frightened dog
I imagined my own girl body poised
on that red arrow until I could almost feel
the tip of it poking into my back drawing
a droplet of blood everything
was a fulcrum and the world
teeter tottered on its tip
a stomach-churning playground
where one wrong wiggle would send
my equal and opposite whizzing
through the air or myself
crashing down the sidewalks
were so spiderwebbed with lines
and chips I could barely
find a space to place my red
Keds but if I stepped
on a crack I would
break my mother’s back and
I didn’t want to really
polycyclic structures
in my dream i tell my husband carry
the cake i’ve made carefully but
he puts his thumb through
the middle of the bundt ring
and carries it hanging down like
a notebook of course
it crumbles to the floor
later in the dream he tells me
that if i had read any scientific
articles about bundt cakes i would
know that they only should be
carried on their sides something
about gravity blah blah blah
mass velocity the bonds of
chocolate molecules in rings
yes dear I say yes
yes
yes yes
yes yes
yes
© Dorritt Carroll, all rights reserved
