Celebrating 15 Years
This piece is excerpted from The Math of Saint Felix, a poetry collection by Diane Exavier ’09. Exavier will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
algebra
and our gospel begins again
and and eucalyptus
and and and dress
and and and and coffee
and Gethsemane
and the ledger sands the stone
and and and and and sand
and where Cortelyou Crosses Ocean
and and and and and and claw
and and and and and and and arms
and permutations
and and and and and and and and rocks
and whale fall
and there is use in the final family
portrait
and
the morning
I turn thirty-two
the sky is mostly cloudy
over my apartment
facing Nostrand
and all my parents are dead
I am rolling my hips
toward death in a dying
city on a planet dying
just a touch slower than me
and one sister jokes we only need thirty more years
in a dream
I have while I am
still thirty-one
I am on a poetry team with
two poets and Tom Hanks and
we’re going on tour and
I haven’t packed my bag
Mommy says there’s a dumpster
by the Key Food where I can throw out paper
and my other sister is in a coma gasping for air at Kings County
now the cat sprints back
and forth across the living room and
my cramps have just begun
and everything tries to say something
but they all talk too much
and you face an impossible choice
so you make a poem
and a poem becomes an integer
a thing complete in itself
and the choice you make is total
choosing family is
choosing the poem
and the poem is the ledger
and I am the ledger
and my sisters and cousins born
in New York are all ledgers
finding out it takes exactly
three parents to survive
four since I had hands in raising myself
six counting my sisters
two if you take away my father four times
diagnosis widowing amputation/removal death
he disappears
he disappears
he disappears
he disappears
Mwen mem, gardener
walk through zeb alone,
caressing midnight’s green.
No one else knows.
his final departure canceled out by you
who gathered us two into three
after raising another five, six
multitude, family
when one disease fills my first mother’s lungs
you place our four
remaining palms in your own
and squeeze after you all leave her on Jérémie’s hillside
and squeeze harder after we all leave him at Brooklyn’s edge
clouds stretch over Linden
as I peek through the steel diamonds
of the grate covering my bedroom window
how is it decided who will hold
what carries over
Manman Tout moun mwen ye.
My leather heels take bright red dust.
I hold the girl’s dress in my arms.
Tulle over”ows. Watch how my hands
don’t squeeze water from clouds.
and what made you ready
to balance the teetering quotient
above your head like the pot of water
your mother sends you to carry
back to the house but you get distracted by
a girl a disruption a conspiring miracle
and the pot falls to the ground
in pieces in front of the sun
at the threshold of your feet
water splashing cool
and your mother’s wrath
makes you clever walking home with the sun
makes you blame someone else’s daughter
for why there is no water to lift down
into your mother’s arms as she stands
at the open door gripping her cleaver
Blade sharp or dull, the tool still works.
I guard the threshold. Butcher mwen ye.
and the morning I am
thirty-two I laugh at the sum
of you my second mother
a girl
fighting other girls
a girl
spilling water in dirt
a girl
clacking across clay towards the butcher’s house
a girl
going home
a girl
too small to solve anyone’s problems
Mommy, we always like that the way we was
and
our gospel begins again
with your C-section in the middle
of Brooklyn’s hottest month.
Your fist daughter arrives.
By the time the flights have landed
and the stone has been set
over the mausoleum, you have three
fish: two more than the one you made.
This is a big feast and you
are ready to hold the cleaver.
For years you chop and cook and serve and laugh
and watch your fish eat and burp and sleep
and run and sneak and
wish and fall and fail and
fight and burn and hide and
lonely and desire and
we prophecies
want something
after the avenue
until a confused organ lying behind the faded scar
of the surgeon’s incision begins to snarl at its neighbors.
Still, you plate the food since the violence,
not so bothersome, occurs for no reason.
How could any problem not be solved
by the multiplication of fish?
How could your body not be made whole
by releasing us into the world?
Keep cooking, keep making sure everyone
is fed, keep howling at your fish to come eat
keep doing the laundry
the closet
the laundry
the closet
the kitchen cabinet
that corner in the living room
because, Mommy, you marinate the red
snapper in parsley, garlic, and lime.
Wrap each fillet in a light coat of flour
before a gentle lay in the hot oil bed.
Scoop rice between your fingers
to press against our young lips.
And now that I can’t feel the tips of your fingers,
and now that I can’t watch the flick of your wrist,
I ask, where is the mother who carved you hands?
Where are our mothers who sculpted us fins
so we fish could flap on and on for anything
but what was crisping in the pan. A silence,
how I never learned to use my mouth with you,
wailing in secret wondering if fish scream.
and
and
the moral of our parable is
we swell
in the shadows of men
we grow
in abysmal time
which is to say
our tragic stories
have much to do
with sad songs
of a sex
Why make me your satellite?
those lords
and saviors
and fathers
and husbands
and lovers
and uncles
and brothers
our men
singing praises
of riches they believe
they were promised
like the growling
minnows they are
Why do I have to be your attendant?
and
and and
the thing about fish is
they’re always too late at
the end of September
still settling into thirty-one
a Manischewitz red
drowns the Flatbush night
swimming up Nostrand
time stretches its
throat wide enough
to welcome death down
deep and the fish
can’t even see it
I’ve spent the day watching
too many episodes
of Grace and Frankie
you are in good spirits
when I pick up the phone
at the Q on Parkside
I can see you in the hospital bed
gossiping with your sister
while your youngest chaperones
she buys a sandwich
you wolf it down
uninterested in the hospital meals
we picked out the day before
Saturday needs a distraction
I don’t know how tired I am
I don’t know how tired you are
no one has any idea
what havoc a single dose of
prednisone is wreaking
on your liver
we don’t know how long
your liver has been working
against the rest of your body
you ask your sister
to make you a bouyon
for Monday
and
and
and
and
I hate time and how it wells
up in the middle of July
still in bed on Lenox
becoming thirty-two
thinking of how quiet Nostrand
could be in October
thinking of how Cortelyou
once bled violet
and
Gethsemane
was never as dark
as the moment I cross
my ex-lover’s threshold
proposing to begin again.
Before I make the suggestion
he walks me
in that black space and real light
through his renovated kitchen,
a room we never spent time in
during the year of whatever we were
doing. The walls are now painted mop
water brown. Newly installed grey
faux wood floorboards line up
at the seams instead of staggering
like they would on a page
of Architectural Digest. This was
not what I imagined when he told
me about his vision. Maybe
something has slipped
between his sight and reality,
reality being how your time
encounters other people’s time.
After he doesn’t take the deal,
a deal I offer even though I feel
aggressed by the aesthetics
of his new kitchen, he sends me
home in a Lyft with my
misery, prompting me to unearth
the list of qualities I desire
in a partner and place it under
my pillow so I can
remember what I want
because I hate pretending
I am good at kneeling
in front of statues.
Two days after that visit through
the night’s garden, we three fish
bring Mommy to Brooklyn Methodist,
in preparation for our unexpected
month-long Passion.
and
The ledger sands the stone and the funeral must be paid for and of course we can’t put you in the ground and we have to get the eye-level mausoleum and companion will sound nice, but your sisters get jealous. Westminster gets you all in the same house, but that’s 20k upfront. It has to be Brooklyn, even though your other two sisters rest in Jérémie. I’m angry everyone could never breathe in the same place at the same time. I have to make sure all deposits clear before cutting cashier’s checks. I give both checks to the funeral director who will have the driver of the hearse hand deliver one to the groundskeeper at the cemetery. I expect it to rain the night of your wake and I know you’ll have a clear sky in the morning for the funeral. The only reasonable time for a mass is Saturday at 9am. I will not buy a dress that exposes your body’s neck. I will not buy a dress that exposes my body’s neck. I know better. I stop at Sephora to pick up powder and waterproof mascara. I spend 4 hours getting Senegalese twists. For once I’m not cheap and browse the evening wear section at Macys. I try to catch my breath in the dressing room. I buy a Calvin Klein tuxedo dress at full price. I buy 2 designer coats on sale. I complete my outfit with additional pieces from New York & Company and Banana Republic. You’d hate what I’m wearing. I get $8 tights from Target. Charge it all. I’ll pay it o$ 18 months later. I wear heels so I look like a woman and I stand up straight so I look like I know what I’m doing. I don’t stop talking. My eyes drink in people’s bodies and I think of their working organs. I keep your sisters away from your decorated corpse.
I want to tell everyone you are not in that casket and no one would understand what I’m saying. The first row of seats remains empty for me and your two other fish. We never sit since we’re busy consoling everyone else in the room. My English breaks so I nod my head. I don’t cry. To keep the makeup from getting on people trying to touch me, I simply lift my chin.
and
and
and
and
and
Mommy’s death filling the silence between each last text
Mommy’s death making it impossible to listen to music
the songs he keeps sending
the way he declares love
the pride in the complaint of having to tend care
I didn’t want to pay attention and now I am your
picker upper, stationed here as my duty, clueless.
it doesn’t matter
how many or
which one or
the degree of failure
platonic, romantic, familial
I am not talking
about men
I am talking
about how men take time
Permission to reprint this excerpt of Diane Exavier’s The Math of Saint Felix is granted by the publisher, The 3rd Thing. The book is available to purchase at independent bookstores or through the publisher’s website, https://the3rdthing.press.
Diane Exavier ’09 is a writer, educator, and facilitator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. She is the author of the poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix and playwright of Bernarda’s Daughters. Her projects focus on what she calls the 4 L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Diane’s work has been presented by The New Group, National Black Theatre, New York Historical Society, BRIC Arts, and more. She has been commissioned for new play development by Manhattan Theatre Club, Lucille Lortel Theatre, and The New Group. A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and 2021 Jerome Foundation Finalist, Diane lives and works in Brooklyn.
