Errors in Shape
Kelly R. Samuels
A circle
and a bowl and a spoon
were best. Maybe the ovoid, egg in the palm.
This stone is just about perfect.
There’s the changing shape
due to gravity and mass and the glacier transforming
into water, rising.
Imagine a basketball and then here, and here, pressed
down, he says. Though
my hands were never big enough.
This geoid. This rotation.
He’d spin it on the top of and then run, girls stamping
their feet in the stands.
Later, we’d walk out into the night, looking up
momentarily—
a hand elsewhere.
I read of how our faces lengthen as we age, the nose broadening.
Is that me, there, now?
Is that you, in passing?
We’re not what we thought we were.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, The Carolina Quarterly, The Pinch, and Salt Hill. She lives in the Upper Midwest.
