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      December 9, 2017CalculusJoel Chace

      impossible to have sat
      through class after class
      to have scrawled a reams
      worth of lined paper with
      homework that would look
      like Arabic now to have
      taken an actual goddamn
      final exam jesus and not
      just pass it but end
      up with a flying mothercolor
      grade 35 years ago 35
      years all burned
      away like valley fog
      to remember nothing except
      that Mrs. Barnhart the teacher
      already near the end
      of her long road over
      the math mountains and had
      cranked around far too
      many switchbacks would
      say at miraculously random
      moments the words “value” or
      “and yet” it’s absolutely
      true and it was like a
      whacky gift she kept on
      giving for instance
      she’d say turning away
      from the rune-crammed
      blackboard chalk dust misting
      off her fingertips and cheeks she’d
      say “that’s the
      way we lick that
      problem … value” or
      “just remember this
      formula you’ll
      be all right … and
      yet” 23 “values”
      and 21 “and yets” the
      record for one forty-minute
      period Mary Pat Doyle with
      the jet black hair kept
      track her face still floats
      up in dreams still
      that young and stunning and so
      does Mrs. Barnhart’s still hard
      and thick like granite like
      marble which she’s definitely
      mouldering under by now what would
      it be like to find both
      of them again Mrs. Barnhart and say
      “there was something of
      value after all” and Mary
      Pat Doyle and say “look
      we can’t undo a thing we
      followed certain signs
      and countersigns and we are
      where we are and yet
      if we’d ended
      up together that might
      have been a perfect solution
      too”

      from Issue #11 - Summer 1999

      Joel Chace

      “My maternal grandparents were farmers and staunch Upstate New York Republicans. Across town, however, lived my paternal grandparents, who I would visit regularly. This grandfather was a brakeman on the Delaware & Hudson Railroad, and he voted for Eugene V. Debs every time Debs ran for president. My grandmother was a painter. My mother worked for a time on Wall Street. My father was a jazz trombonist and vocalist, who was on the road for a dozen years until his marriage in 1942. I write in order to come closer to understanding my own origin and being, out of the vortex of these lives.”

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