Rae Spencer’s most recent poem to appear here was Ink (September 2012).

The Calculus of Parting Lovers
By Rae Spencer

The distance between parting lovers is a function
Of their shared perspectives

A graph of memory and memento
Coordinates collapsing toward touch

Toward the brush and clutch of passion
The bruising clash of expectation

And disappointment, a cold vertex
Of potential and spurned

Differentials, an elliptic space
Void of parallels, every path

Meeting itself in the future
Returning over and over again

The area under their curves summed
Into infinite infinitesimals, a hyperbolic

Trinity of disagreement, disenchantment
And silence inflating the fatal variable

Contempt mapped into a matrix of failure
Scrawled on the walls of a classroom

Where paradox lingers unsolved
Scratched through with derivatives

Corrected with new expressions, each of them
A more elegant separation than the last