NEW MATH

by Tricia Knoll

We have to assume other people do his math.
Fill out the multiple lines on multiple forms
with different answers depending on to whom
he is giving his tax returns. Maybe he is even
math challenged and would never check
those figures for exaggerations. How would
he know one from the other; his life is base-ten
on bloat. We know he thinks parts per million
of CO2 in the atmosphere are not proportionate
with disturbing one fraction of a second of his time.

The military did the recent math for him,
he hadn’t asked until late in the game
about the rules: how many people could die
to balance the loss of a drone. He says
one hundred and fifty is too many.
Not proportionate. (And ludicrously
low we suspect.) So are they sitting
around right now trying to decide
what is the right proportion? A figure
that works for a world teetering
on the brink of another war disaster?
Math you can explain to a child
who can hold up two fingers
to tell his age?

He might be able to handle the old daisy oracle.
It’s pretty simple. Pluck a petal. Pluck a petal.
He loves me. He loves me not.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She is spending a lot of time pulling up invasive species in a woods, thinking about math and probabilities.

LETTER TO DONALD DUCK FROM SPIDERMAN

by Richard Garcia

Hey Donald, where have you been?
I haven't seen any Donald
Duck Part II movies. And what happened
to that uncle of yours,
Scrooge or something, used
to swim in his swimming pool full of
money? Some people say he just one day
disappeared, and now you have enough
money to sail your yachts across oceans
of money. I know, they're grown up now
and working for you, but I always
wondered about those nephews of yours,
Huey, Dewey, and Louie. How did they
just show up like that one day? And who's
their momma? Do they both have the
same Momma? Did you adopt them from
some Iron Curtain country? What
happened to Daisy? And I never could
understand about that dog of yours. I
mean, if Pluto is a dog, just who or what
is Goofy? He's got the feet of a clown,
body of some lanky oaf, face of a buck-
tooth bloodhound and talks like some
stupid alien. Is he human or some kind of
DNA experiment gone wrong? Donald,
I'm worried about you. You hiding out?
It's not enough to be a comic book hero
anymore. You have to be a franchise, a
package, several  blockbusters, T-shirts,
hoodies, action figures. You've got to
keep up, Donald. You know, I heard about
that flop of a Clark Kent. He doesn't even
know there's no newspapers any more.
He was seen running around skid row in
that same business suit. And guess what,
he was still looking for a phone booth.
Just a word to the wise Donald, get your
spidey sense going. Maybe get yourself
a mask, a costume or something.

Richard Garcia's recent books, The Other Odyssey from Dream Horse Press and The Chair from BOA, were both published in 2015. His recent book Porridge was published by Press 53 in 2016. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Georgia Review, Spillway, Poetry and in anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. He lives in Charleston, S.C.