(f o g) (x) or love poem

Britt Kaufmann

send me your star charts

graphs of a treasure map

so I can trace

my finger along the curves

we rarely get out of a relationship

precisely what we put in

but I’d even take the time

solve our riddle algebraically

plug away

step after careful step

past all the exes

to find where you’ve hidden your heart

Britt Kaufmann is a poet, playwright, and math tutor who lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. Her work has been featured in Scientific American, AMS: FOCUS, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics among other literary journals. Her book Midlife Calculus chronicles, in poems, the year she took calculus for the first time at age 47. brittkaufmann.com