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I stand alone in the crowd
watching the poets out of the corner of my eye
the six or seven older men with shoulder-length hair
long trench coats and
sophisticated hats
I slowly sidle closer to the group
carefully picking my way to the bar
on pretense of ordering another drink
one of the poets laughs loudly at something
maybe me
I stand close to the group
pretending to be absorbed in the band on stage
practicing my smart and serious expressions
waiting for just one of them to say
hey, I enjoyed your reading, hey
you kind of sucked up there, hey,
you're kind of hot.
thirty years past childhood
and I'm still waiting for the popular kids
to invite me to play.
Pythagoras did his best work
in the dark, setting up his experiments
in the equivalent to
an isolation tank, eyes wide open
circles and triangles and the number 12
all spinning around in his head.
Down the street from Pythagoras, Archimedes
stacked squares and rectangles on top of each other
gave lectures to star-struck pupils
of levers that could move the world.
in between the two of them lived a woman
whose husband had been killed in Sparta.
He left her a map
of where he buried his share of the spoils of war
but she had never learned to read
and he had barely learned to write.
It would have been enough money
to move her to a better neighborhood.
I will know I have lived a good life
when everything I own
at the time of my death
can fit into a shoebox
you can slip under the bed
so when you want to talk
or just remember
you can reach down beneath the covers
and pull all of me out
the poems, our rings
the last good photographs
of the two of us together
we can always be together.
I won't take up much room.
Holly Day is a journalism instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities. Her poetry and fiction has most recently appeared in The Packingtown Review, The MacGuffin, and Midnight Screaming.
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22 Jun 2010, 04:29