Owed to Pedagogy

It was the dead center of summer,

& anyone but us would’ve been

outside hours ago, flailing

like a system of larks against

the hydrant’s icy spray. But a girl

had her orders, & to disobey

our mother was, in a sense, to invite

one’s own destruction, cause to pray

that a god of mercy might strike first.

So we lay, still as stars on the living

room floor, poring over algorithms:

divisors & dividends, quotient

the first synonym for resolution

I ever learned, & would later

come to love for its sound alone,

how it reminded me, even then,

of words like quantum & quotation

mark, both ways of saying nothing

means what you think it means

all the time. The observable

universe hides behind its smooth

obsidian dress, & all we can

do is grasp at it in myths

& figures, see what sticks,

give all our best language

to the void. What dark irony,

these coy, child philosophers,

theorizing how things break

from the floor of a house

where everything is more

or less in flux, indeterminate

as the color of the blood

in a body. Or the speed

at which I learned

to obliterate the distance

between myself

& any given boy

on the block, the optimal

angle of the swing

most likely to drop

another kid cold

in front of his crew,

to square up, square

off, & this too was a kind

of education, the way

my sister held both fists

semi-adjacent, each an inch

or so from her switchblade

eyes, showed me

the stance you take

when the math doesn’t

quite shake out, so it’s just

you & the unknowns

& the unknowns

never win.