there is one and only one circle passing through any three points
BY TRACY MAY FUAD
I can’t explain the nature of my need to photograph
the missing
signs hung up in foreign cities, but it grew
like a bulb
in the spring where I used to knead my sweet
fixations like
batches of sourdough bread. I wasn’t able to speak
in French
or any tongue until I opened your mouth with mine, the holy
O-to-O
which kept me in the tangle-sticks above the cliff, atop the
long stairs
to your cellar, where you keep your bottles of candy pink
anti-heartburn.
Given any three points, there is a single corresponding ring –
is it
true? I doubt the line of questioning but the dots of zero dimension
pin parts
of me in place. The shape is always changing, like living
inside of a –
the circle, I mean, is shrinking and growing as we go about
our daily
transmogrifications, turning kernels fat from sun into
higher emotions,
acting factory for dopamine, for melancholy.
Who needs
a miracle? I wrote this on the hill they call Mont Royal in Montreal,
needling into
the future as I always do, living on mind-slides lit by the dying
light bulb
of an old projector, whirring and whetting its levers with new
spitting images,
stacked into the abyss of a memory drive, where they
blink unstitched.
The deconstructed quilt is just a heap of scraps and holds
no heat
on the screen of my laptop, which is murmuring: were we,
are we?
