This piece is featured in Issue No. 5 Flirt

Poetry

Numerology \\ Office Lunch

Numerology

Multiply me
Catch me on the page and write a table of contents for me
Draw me along your compass and send me in circles
Do I fit on your ruler
And should I figure out how long the page isn’t?
In your foggy place of 10-digits
Make me a part of your equation

Can you build me a kitchen tonight?
I want to practice my long division with a stir-fry
And then after dinner let’s slip between the ruled sheets
To do some multiplication of our own
We can swap tabulations like sweet nothings
And repeat the two times tables like pick-up lines

The calculator is our graven image 
And our love is in numerical order 
On the weekends, our favourite pastime is three times twenty-three 
(You do the math)
Our addition is perfect and I never dreamt
That someone could round my decimals points like you can

Let the neighbours do their fractions
The only excitement in their lives is their phone number
We’ve got our abacus, so nothing is going to be in error now
You plotted yourself on my graph
So we can flip, slide, and rotate
Through all our transformations

And I know that I will never do geometry alone again

Office Lunch

This is life on the park bench:
Galahad arrives in lingerie
The wisdom of King Solomon turns cranky
The other men who sit nearby are turning pages
though they could just as easily change their politics

Someone in the distance is selling lipsticks of loneliness
because that’s the way to be in a corporatized time
You and I have chairs of simplistic adulation
where we share discussions concocted on enigmas in the end
and our class of sex is not determined

Shall we go to the show tonight?
(which really means
shall we lounge naked in the middle of winter
while singing jazz riffs
and sipping hot tea?)

Softly teach me to be a jester
it is such an exquisite philosophy
My ordered mind becomes a choir of telegrams
passing the message on
In this scraped away wonderland
we are expounding the noontime perfunctory

Our faces are a flash of a grin
warmed next to a sleeping leather jacket
All this happened on the edge of an afternoon
Mindlessly, and through plastic teeth it happened
But this is life on a park bench

Tamara Best

Tamara Best

Tamara Best started ‘coming out’ and writing poetry in 1994, and has compiled this writing into a manuscript titled “History Lessons.” Hopefully it will be published sometime within the next 30 years. In the meantime, you can read more of Tamara’s writing in the Waterwheel Review, Sparked! Magazine, and NonBinary Review.