Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis who teaches needlepoint classes in the Minneapolis school district. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review, the Oxford American, and Slipstream, and she is a recent recipient of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar-All-in-One for Dummies, and Music Theory for Dummies, which has recently been translated into French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese.
Around the Corner
By Holly Day
in the dark, setting up his experiments
in the equivalent to
an isolation tank, eyes wide open
circles and triangles and the number 12
all spinning around in his head.
Down the street from Pythagoras, Archimedes
stacked squares and rectangles on top of each other
gave lectures to star-struck pupils
of levers that could move the world.
In between the two of them lived a woman
whose husband had been killed in Sparta.
He left her a map
of where he buried his share of the spoils of war
but she had never learned to read
and he had barely learned to write.
It would have been enough money
to move her to a better neighborhood.
Sometimes you just can’t win. Nice job.
Clever and fun too!