Back to Issue Twenty-Two.

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?

 

Tracy May Fuad is a poet, essayist, and occasional chef based in Jersey City, where she is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Rutgers-Newark. Her work has appeared in Prelude, Sixth Finch, BOAAT, Tammy, Ninth Letter, Sixth Finch, Cut Bank and elsewhere. She was the winner of the Montana Prize in Nonfiction, and is currently working on a manuscript about Saddam Hussein.

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