#math escapril

11. An Odd Number Of…

parity is so definite, so final so claustrophobic there’s just nowhere to breathe in this formal statement of oddness

to be, odd, or not to be, odd there is no leeway, no slack the integers must feel very pinned down, they must

drive their wives crazy buying sports cars to feel something

12. I Think We’re Lost

to be lost at sea the sea being graduate school graduate school being men who are self prophetic captains of the war boat

sorry, what I mean to say is that math academia feels a lot like a naval ship rigid and overwhelming and full of men with some

kind of complex the complex not being complex numbers it’s all very confusing we are all very lost

13. Palmful

take just a little not more than a palmful don’t worry if you don’t feel it right away knowledge can be intoxicating the rush of sharp clarity one feels it’s a high to be chased but we must be careful we must practice harm reduction

14. Taxidermy

preserving something dead how unnerving and pretty to be the same after the transformation except not really

some of the life of a vector is lost when we change spaces but we pretend not to see it how unnerving and pretty, we say

15. Something Very Gentle

6. Time (Nonlinear)

sometimes I wish I were a Vonnegut character, detached from that linear arrow of time

what’s the fourth dimension all about anyways? I just want to know that all moments

past, present, and future have always existed, always will exist, let me say this and believe

7. Body Swap

swap a cube’s vertices with her faces and you’ll have her octahedral lover they fit perfectly together

no other platonic solid could ever pour her coffee that way

8. ____ As Medicine

reading mathematics is a medicine take enough and you will feel better life won’t feel quite as pointless just don’t take too much don’t overdose that’s how Gödel died

9. We’re Not Alone

mathematics is a lonely field it ought not to be, yet the men who lock themselves in rooms, insist upon it I know this to be an

act of ego, want for legacy a contrived scarcity keeping Andrew’s wiles alone, working in secret so as not to share glory

10. Magnification

1. When I Opened My Eyes

I didn’t trust induction for a time

seeing is believing

in higher dimensions the cubes look

funny but once I opened my eyes

(not the the eyes in my sockets,

my metaphoric inner visualization of what it means

to take a leap)

I did

2. A Separation

in topology and related

branches of mathematics, separated

sets are pairs of subsets of a

given topological space that

are related to each other

in a certain way: roughly

speaking, neither overlapping

nor touching

let us never love disjoint like that baby I mean

keep the song between us

please don’t fall victim to topology

3. Limbs

tree limb

union of some branches

graph theorists love getting

nasty in the forest

4. Strange Behavior

the Banach-Tarski paradox

says take one body and become two

it is a paradox

but as a woman I understand

what it means to create another from

my own flesh and my own bone

to write it off as a fluke

never quite shaking eerie feeling

5. Crush

did you know that odd

numbers have crushes on the evens

they touch yet there’s so much

infinity between them it would be

unreasonable

to assume there