Tyrone Williams

In the old math

of Base Lumber

the square root

of a two-by-four

is two-by-twos

of sawn timber

dredged up

from a flood-

plain nee wood-

headed vector

following a tangent

only up

to a point

on a curved

surface that

for all the world

appears flat.

Now the dispensation

of carbon-based

attachments to

intelligent

holograms

disabuses

future extinctions

of a specious

nom de plume

underwriting

henceforth

left-handedness

tilts to

asymmetry

browns out-blue

skies blue

as the blue-

eyed earth

watches God-

black holes

wink at palimpsests.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of several chapbooks and six books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madress Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011) and As Iz (Omnidawn 2018). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited the anthology, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/