I lose the language to speak to my body
so I pick up math for its new notation.
I wear out fingernails & nights on graph
paper & learn matrices, determinants, sets.
The best part is that I’m no good at math,
never have been. I tire professors & scrap paper,

exhausting notebooks with errors & papering
margins with graphite. Tattooing the clean body
of a proof with eraser scrubs & messy math.
To improve my reasoning, I bring notation
into my routines. In the mirror, my body is a set
bloated with numbers; I try to graph

it & cull the outliers. Numbers, when graphed,
take you over with new sorts of violence. On my papers
I see the arc of my hip bones, lines branching off into sets
split like hairs, tessellations of fat & flesh. I can enumerate my body
and it’s comforting, almost. To find a notation
where I’m not supposed to. If I can make math

out of myself I must not be so wrong. My math
professor invites me to his office alone & asks me to graph
a problem & asks me not to tell anyone. I note
the strangeness of this, and my skin papers
with red as though corrected. The parts of my body
that read as woman feel obvious, can’t be set

aside. In the end, he just wants to teach me set
theory. I think. I leave his office & wander the math
building. It’s quiet & hollow, & my body
throws shadows against the walls. It warps the graph-
like angles of the building. I wonder, if I become paper-
thin, if I’ll still seem so woman. The body has its own notation,

spelling itself out. To learn to read this notation,
you don’t need a class. It’s all in the set
of your jaw, the arms over your chest. I thought paper
could help me out of my body. Or into it. That math
would dewoman me methodically, as if along the axes of a graph.
Really, I’ve just learned to move around my body,

to avoid anything that even bears the shape of a body,
anything soft or innumerable or unable to see through graphing.
This is what I mean when I say I study math.