My father said, “You will be
a perfect human.” And I
wondered, as a child,
if I was not human,
was I serpent, perhaps?
perhaps circle,
eclipse, or parabola? the curve
of a flat plane cutting
through a cone? Was I,
at all, beautiful? Women,
they said, were not human.
My algebra was different,
but my students never left.
When I would not bend
to bless their christ,
they carved my skin away
with slivers of shell.
They quartered my
body and not for the heavens,
though I knew those heavens
and how they might hold me.
I was an equation
with multiple solutions.
I saw every possibility
in every kind of person,
not just the shapes at
the ends of my fingers–
but the divine forms
transfixed, rooted in
the sight of truth. I chose
to fall in love with wisdom
and reason. I might’ve
been your perfect human,
I might’ve been your
philosopher king.
