It's Like I'm Talking to a Textbook

The number you have dialed is imaginary.
Please rotate your axis ninety degrees and try again.
— Q.'s voicemail

mathematically speaking

let's talk sets
let's talk Hawaiian Archipelagoes
and the topologist's sine curve
your arm is discussing with mine
in these egg-crate chairs.

let's talk pairs and let's pinch hills
from maps with the snaps of our fingers

let's plot eggplant paths navigable
only by right turns and sass.

you shouldn't mock Lewis Carroll.
you two are a lot alike:

a fine taste for Euclidean geometries
Cheshire cat curves and wonderland girls.

mathematicality, speaking—

I am the discography of disbelief.
you are every wrong number that ever was.

Alex Yuschik once haunted a stormy city, bits of broken dice and sparrows' feathers dangling in her hair. Her work has also appeared in Mint Poetry and Illumen Magazine.