NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY
I scratch at geometry homework, figure rise
over run, mark a moment of knowable space.
Inside the kitchen table leg, a carved letter K:
my sister, gone a year. I touch her knifed hollows.
Our hands are points A and B on a line to infinity.
Near the TV, my grandmother’s iron hisses
water, sears an angled sleeve. Nevermind
her heavy soap-opera whispers, the killing off,
labyrinthine characters shifting, fading, reincarnating.
Where do you end? I ask the letter.
What I don’t know hurts less: past the brown
yard where ground fuses with sky, the earth bends.
Parallel lines converge, pressed like our faces,
horizon-pink at night. Sleep baby, my sister said,
heart buzzing eons-old dust. An early moon licks
pine trees, follows movement I cannot pencil:
slope of a runaway. Evening clots a window,
soundproof to stars plotting loss in the dark.
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KATE BONNICI is a writer and lawyer living with her husband and children in Los Angeles. She grew up in rural Alabama and graduated from Harvard University and New York University School of Law. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Southern Humanities Review, The Examined Life Journal, Kudzu Review, MotherWriterMentor, and The Fertile Source (and she currently serves as Guest Poetry Editor of that journal). She was a finalist for the 2012 Morton Marr Poetry Prize.
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