I don’t consider myself a poet
I like to think I’m a mathematician;
There’s something burning inside her
That I can’t quite calculate.
Each time she speaks
I listen closely for hidden x’s and y’s
Maybe a z or two
But my mind is distracted by the movement of her lips
A cosine curve in dark red.
She ties her hair up into deep chestnut twists
My abstract geometry professor wasn’t lying
Fibonacci spirals do exist everywhere.
I love mathematics
Puzzles, missing pieces, transformations through numeral planes
God, this is the most challenging puzzle of them all
I scribble out equations over and over
And smear graphite on my fingertips
But my final conclusion is always the same:
I love this girl more than I ever could the numbers.
J.L. Von Ende is eighteen-year-old writer from Washington, D.C. His hobbies include: feeding pigeons, studying mathematics, writing, and riding the subway for fun.