By Christine Gosnay

The universe expands understandably
because of its many edges, twisting

Its edges are everywhere and everywhere
are its edges

The cracked dial on the gas hob is the edge,
the blind kitten’s black ear,

All the earth’s hotbeaten glass, the belt
around my father’s neck,

And so forth, such as the limits of plotted expressions
and the cores of galaxies.

Edges. Tearing, however,
isn’t allowed.

It means that when I pull nothing out from the soft center
where my stomach, pale and useful, longs,

Pulling as if at a doll’s string to say ache
in a bright, unrecognizable voice,

I move my mind by the hand from the dark blue room
where it is thinking-feeling

Toward the edge of the blank graph
where it does its knowing-thinking,

A place where, like honey, time passes down glass
in delightful, jagged spiros,

sensibly different,
undifferently arranged.

Understandably, in this way, because of the infinite corners
where, shot with longing, longing springs,

I discover myself holding a small yellow book of mathematics
in one hand,

the fullness of my sunlit skin in the other.

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Christine Gosnay was born in Baltimore and has lived most recently in Israel and California. Her first book, Even Years (Kent State University Press, 2017), was selected by Angie Estes for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, The Poetry Review, and Third Coast.

Originally published in NOR 22.