Numbers Frightened Me

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Robin Michel

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Not the shapes, colors and textures decorating the classroom walls,
but what to do after writing each problem in pencil on lined paper
knowing my erasures would rub holes into the once smooth surface.

When no one looked, I counted on my fingers, needing more digits than ten.
I felt like a cheaply made abacus assembled from leftover bits; bent wires
slowing clumsy fingers. I learned to be meticulous—style over substance—
writing wrong answers in pretty columns & earning passing marks.

Daily, I grew more proficient at tallying my deficiencies:
               To not understand mathematics was to be dumb.
               To be dumb was to be without a voice.
               To be without a voice was to suffer constant erasures.
               To be a woman made from Adam’s remaindered rib.

Girls are not as good at math, I was told, as was my mother before me.
I didn’t see how easily I could string beads and make patterns
out of found objects; the formulas and geometric shapes hiding
in my constant doodles; the everyday music gliding through my days,
the Mother Goose iambic pentameter on which I cut my teeth.

Never did I guess that someday I might learn to reinvent arithmetic.
                                                                                                                              Make it my own.

__________

Robin Michel (she/her) is a poet and writer whose work appears in many journals and anthologies, and the author of the poetry collection Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky (Raven & Wren Press, 2023) and the award-winning chapbook Things Will Be Better in Bountiful (Comstock Review, 2024). Robin is left-handed, lives in San Francisco, and still counts on her fingers. She is grateful for mechanical calculators, and inventor Blaise Pascal.

__________

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