I’m Not a Mathematician

By Patrick Holian

Issue 50 • Fall 2024 • Poetry

we kept along the western banks of the river, mostly, on our walks. we wanted
to cross to the other side, enter the redwoods, perhaps get lost,

but we didn’t want it enough to actually cross the water. my mother’s friends,
the ceramicist and her husband—he designed oil drill bits, which

we never discussed or tried to reconcile, he was smart and kind and you had to
lean close to him to hear him speak, he was that soft spoken—they

let us stay in their beautiful house down the coast for a few weeks after they heard
the news. we walked in the morning and the late morning and the

late afternoon and the early afternoon and at all hours of the night, they had very
expensive flashlights, and we couldn’t muster the energy to worry

about bears or cougars. the house itself looked like a barn from fifty or a hundred
years in the future, maybe in Norway, each room teeming with plants

and books, religious texts, too, they were both Lutheran priests, and we read science
fiction and detective novels and history books and avoided the religious

texts, which covered every belief system under the sun, except we didn’t really avoid
them, we flipped through them when we thought the other person

was asleep or taking a bath or in the infrared sauna or using their ERG machine
or taking a particularly long shit. this was our third time,

his name was going to be Manuel or Pedro or Leon. one night I threw a t-shirt
into the river, remember? and one morning you drank a few bottles

of wine and fell asleep on the rowing machine, remember? the adjustment to the
new silence—it wasn’t silence, really, we could hear the river

and the insects and the trees moaning in the wind and the odd coyote or, that one
night, what we thought might have been wolves—was easier

than we thought it would be, our apartment those days was so loud, and we would
joke on our walks along the banks of the river about killing

my mother’s friends. when we finally left, on the drive out of the valley, you had me pull
off the highway, the rains that winter had been severe,

and that spring super blooms were erupting all across the state, and that stretch of the
highway was suffocating between these golden walls of wild black mustard.

you got out of the car to grab a few armfuls to bring home with us, and I got out of the car
to stretch my legs and lean against the trunk and not help you,

as you wished. I looked up beyond the mustard, to the hills above, where I saw a family
of deer, there were seven of them spread out in a loose ring,

grazing and ambling about, two adults and five fawns. you told me to move and open the trunk
so you could stuff the long stalks of mustard in on top of our bags,

then you stuffed more into the back seat. when we got back on the highway, after a few minutes, you told me how the Franciscan Padres planted the mustard along

El Camino Real, or that’s what you had heard, they had planted the mustard for its brilliance,
so they might light the path, and you told me the mustard was as invasive

and destructive as it was beautiful, and I tried to tell you about the family of deer I saw,
I really did, but there were seven of them, and two of us, five really,

but I’m not a mathematician, you’ve always known that about me, and I didn’t know
what to do with those numbers or how to even begin.

Patrick Holian

Patrick Holian (he/him/his) is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Barrelhouse,The Arkansas Review, PRISM international, Bennington Review, The Acentos Review, and Yalobusha Review, he was a 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s fiction finalist, a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee.

Cynthia Yatchman

Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle-based artist and art instructor. A former ceramicist, she received her B.F.A. in painting (UW). She switched from 3D to 2D and has remained there ever since. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections. She has exhibited on both coasts, extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, SPU, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the Pacific Science Center. She is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA.