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?    

 

 

Fuad 22

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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