This morning over breakfast
my daughter tells me her dream
of long division. At first
she's sailing through a math test,
jumbles of numbers swelling and breaking
gently down all around her,
the stalwart rudder of her number 2 pencil
steering her steadfastly through. But then
out of nowhere, a word problem:
The house over the world.
A fraction the shape of an iceberg.
She can't simplify and she can't
tack. She can only
watch as the house turns into our house,
and the dream turns into the nightmare
of our house divided by the world.
The world into our house,
how many times?
Paul Hostovsky's poems appear and disappear widely online and in print, with most recent sightings in Poet Lore, Free Lunch, FRiGG, Visions International, Paper Street, Alimentum, Rock & Sling, and others. Paul works in Boston as an interpreter for the deaf.
