TRAJECTORY

by Carol Dorf





The problem set gives us: a stone, force, an angle.

Given this, predict when the stone will hit the ground.

Outside the book this problem grows more complex

even if there are no dragons to interfere with the trajectory.

Imagine a missile. No don’t. There’s no need to imagine:

haven’t you opened the paper today? Imagine a war

where children’s bodies form the location of the necessary

violence. Don’t authorities always say necessary?


Imagine or don’t the intersection between a missile

and an apartment block. The shoes, the plates,

a shelf full of exploded books. Imagine a graveyard,

damp with morning fog, petrichor rising, pollinators

slipping past the plastic flowers hungry for something real.

Imagine picking up a stone, two stones, and placing them

on a grave, where the story of nothing special here

is more important than a name, than the dates below.



Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose poetry has been published in several chapbooks and in journals that include The New Verse News, About Place, Cutthroat, Unlikely Stories, Rise Up Review, Great Weather For Media, Slipstream, The Mom Egg, Sin Fronteras, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, and Maintenant. They are founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, and taught math in Berkeley.

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