Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Origin of Zero

I knew I loved you when
we fought about the origin of zero.
When I realized we had both
dreamt of telling our children,
We invented the zero, you know.

Your Mayans used it as a placeholder, I would say;
as a nil, a nought, a null and void.
While my Indians saw it as a number,
its own identity.

When our foreheads touched
in that sacred place where there
was no placeholder, no number
to express the time that it took
to give up my righteousness –
that’s when our love, as natural
as the zero itself, began.

What matters is that:
the Greeks didn’t invent it;
picking a number
between one and a hundred is impossible;
we don’t confuse it with an “O”;
it doesn’t change a number
when added.

Now we move with the wisdom of ancients
into that time where what was null is everything,
where what was our number is now our children’s.

© 2009 Simona Supekar

3 Comments

Filed under Poetry

Tea and Curry

When love ends there are the questions: Why? How?
Perhaps we were only held together by roux and well-steeped tea.
Our house seemed to shudder each time we dined,
as though even it realized the need for the South in South Asian.

One day your hands held ready-made curry boxes from S&B;
mine, mustard seeds and cumin.
In your eyes I saw the spindles of silver needles form, sharp like the taste of white tea.
How odd your face seemed, marked by chevrons of sweat, glistening and slick.
I licked the angles, hoping to taste the narcissus, the chaicha.
But my tongue tasted only warm cardamom and cloves.

In the samsara of us there is still a memory;
A place where your tea started as “tu”, and so did mine.
Where your curry was more than the easy noise of the bamboo outside of our house,
creaking and purposeful.


© 2009 Simona Supekar

2 Comments

Filed under Poetry

Let’s stop

and look at us in paint
on canvas as they
would in the 18th
century. Then I will put
a dog in the corner
to tell the world, in 200 years
when our faces are pulled
out of the Nantucket Municipal
Museum basement, that we
were loyal to each other.

Maybe I will paint
a mirror so I can see
painter in paint. And each
day we can come to
this room
and sit
in one place
with the small
bottle of cyan blue
that will be used for your dress
and the silky folds
around your long legs.

© 2009 David B. Crawford

4 Comments

Filed under Poetry

A MISLIFE

I didn’t get the stuffed panda bear at the Walmart, though I screamed and screamed my lungs off.
I didn’t get a compliment from my art teacher on the purple tree I drew.
I didn’t get Suzy to go to the prom with me.
I didn’t get accepted into community college.
I didn’t get the job.
I didn’t get a cot at the homeless shelter.
I didn’t get the fucking methadone at the rehab clinic.
I didn’t a coffin, or a decent funeral, or Mommy’s tears of guilt.

© 2009 Karl Alexander Iglesias

1 Comment

Filed under Fiction

DRIZZLED

over romaine
greens. I wonder
at the pleasure
these pungent
fungi bring —
gold in a chef’s pan.
White truffle oil,
my preference,
more peppery
than the black.

Makes sense —

being part Sicilian —
that the robust Italian
whites appeal more
than the tamer ebon
French ones.
All sub rosa
root-clinging
symbiotic fruiting
tubers — a cabal
of crafty warty walnuts.
Beware the poisonous
false ones. A bit of
truffle oil in brash
hands can be
dreadful excess. Know
the supreme risk —
a snuffling sow
with a bent
for ravenous love
when that special
pheromone flares. Still,
it’s truffles’ hidden
nature that intrigues —
concealed
like the echoed
treasure of my
memories,
my musings,
secrets I let
drizzle
in
my
mind.

© 2009 Deanie Rowan Blank

1 Comment

Filed under Poetry