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