I wasn’t a math star, but one or two of my new friends were.
I liked to work into casual conversation
fusillades of words like nexus and tensor.
The counselor from the department of recreation
said I had the voice of an angry thirty-year-old.
I thought I had a “penetrating gaze”;
kids thought I was staring at them. I had to be told.
After that, I imagined I lived on the moon for two days;
I stood out and hid there, a demented sentry
from an awkwarder parallel world, a young Bizarro.
On our class trip to the beach and the World of Tomorrow,
the boys were igneous. I was sedimentary:
I set out to lie with the other girls on the low dunes
before the morning heat got metamorphic.
They folded their towels and moved off, so I closed my eyes
on the hypothesis that it would make me calmer.
In the talent show, I played piano for Annabelle’s show tunes
(we rehearsed extra for passages marked “improvise”)
then sang “Take a Pebble” by Emerson Lake & Palmer.
They thought I was caterwauling. I thought I was Orphic.