I don’t recognize the number but I instantly feel

the diminishing returns of long stretches

of midwestern emptiness and the long silences

before we acknowledge each other.

It’s a defense mechanism we share

a cat’s eye fingernail moon of a Venn Diagram

where we overlap. But our calculations are flawed.

So reliant on faulty physics, imaginary numbers,

imagined infinities, and frailty, integral and empty,  

we must unearth a new calculus. It’s too difficult.

Complications are complications, requiring resolutions,

Solutions and proof. Each of us plots

our words onto the grid of kinship and blood,

because we’ve been here before, wrenched open 

on the threshold of a dead continental center, 

his voice is complicated static.

George Briggs is a high school teacher from Rhode Island. His poems have appeared in The Unpublishable Zine, Ghost City Review, Door is a Jar Magazine and elsewhere.