Chase Twichell is the winner of Claremont Graduate University’s 2011 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, presented annually to an emerging poet. Twichell has published six books of poetry and co-edited the compendium The Practice of Poetry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in upstate New York.
If you liked geometry,
it meant you were a prude.
Girls who liked algebra put out.
The cool girls (I was not one)
sat cloistered, passing notes
and scoring high on tests.
The first time Mom and Dad split up,
kids from down the block and I lit the dry field
behind the development, then with wet towels
beat back the racing edge on the verge of panic
until we were sure it was out.
I always got that feeling from math.
I writhed like a snake over coals
if it came near me.
Mrs. X, drunk the year we did
multiplication and division,
never checked our workbooks
so no one ever saw the horses
where the answers should have been.
That’s when I first wandered off into
the white pastures on my own,
with nothing but a spiky quiver of words
and an urgent question.
Reprinted with permission from Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)
*Photo courtesy of Spitefully.