A Mathematical Formula for Continuing
I’m asking for a new geography,
something beyond the spiritual.
Tell me again, about that first
drive up Appalachian slopes
how you knew on sight these hills
could be home. I want
this effervescent temporary, here
with the bob-tailed cat
and a hundred hornet nests.
Will you tell me the sequence
of Fibonacci? The secret
of the nautilus? Answer:
After the departure of your bedbound
lover, you took to the spiral,
reached what was thought the end
and found yourself pirouetting.
I have just entered the dance,
crawled inside the shell, you promise
this is its own beginning.
Photo credit: Rachel Balkema (IG @raba.co)
Lake Michigan
This Trail Leads to Lake Michigan
I’ve been reading to numb things, namely
the evidence that my childhood creek
is drying, that something inside me is splintering,
like that wedge of the dock that buried itself in my thumb
while we watched quagga mussels starve another body.
You asked if I still had thoughts about starving. Lake Superior
is the clearest of the Great Lakes, but its belly is hungry.
I dust the house for the third time this week and wonder
at the ecosystem of our apartment: the under watered plants,
the dog that’s always pacing. I meet a stranger on a walk
and learn his home has woodfired heat, that his dog howls
when his wife leaves, that after this he’ll head to church
to cut the turkey. Today is Thanksgiving. I do not ask directions,
I let my conversation ask for company. He points to the trail post.
This leads to Lake Michigan, he says. As if I hadn’t walked this path
since the age my feet could carry me. At home, I ask
M if he’d like a woodfire stove, if he’d like to run away,
build a home with me. Somewhere Great: Lake Superior,
Huron, Erie. How about here? He asks. Why wait to start building?
Shanley Poole is an MFA candidate at UNC-Greensboro. Their work is forthcoming or has been published in Analog, F(r)iction, 14 Poems, and Quarter(ly) Journal. She was a 2017 fellow at the Beargrass Writing Retreat, a 2024 writer-in-residence at Azule Residency, and former Storyteller at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency.
