“add-orexic”
she was a straight-C math student
who hated graphing fractions,
in a flood of A’s and extracurricular
until she started skipping
lunch
the excuse sounded something like
the half an hour to do homework
was more mandatory
than the menu
in two months she brought her
math grade up ten percent and dropped
ten percent of something else,
the way she was
learning to divide her body
made her understand why she had to find “x”
each meal taught her to add
and she invented new ways to subtract
in five months she
became the fraction
and the only thing on the graph
was two digit numbers
and red circles to mark
every
wrong
answer.

 

(Indubitably, this is not my strongest poem. It will need workshopping. But, here I begin!)

__ar.