Mantis 21 (Summer 2023)
New Poetry

Kenton K. Yee


  It’s Accrual World

If you work 7, commute 2, sleep 7, and waste 7 hours

today, how much time is left to pursue what you like?

To change your life, sometimes a little math is all you need.

I know, you’re a humanist / artist / leader,

above bothering with math or manual labor.

Me too.

A dose of fuzziness every day keeps the actuary away.

Even mathematicians have flirted with fuzzy numbers,

i.e., ‘garbage’ in lay terms / ‘nonsense’ in literary terms.

Painters / poets / presidents / marketeers have popularized

nonsense with success. The trick is to ground

88% nonsense in 2% truth and 7% beauty.

A little makeup goes a long way.

As every brown bear knows, garbage is 63% refuse,

12% compost, 25% recyclables, and 69% delicious.

The squirrel refuses a dandelion head

but gobbles up your apple core. Hello, goodbye.

Pi never stops while 3.1415926 times zero is zero.

This is the difference between truth and beauty

if you want to know the truth / beauty of it.


M.P. CARVER is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and miCrO-Founder of the journal Molecule: a tiny lit mag. In 2022, her poem “You & God & I” won the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize. Her work has appeared in 9x5, an anthology of emerging voices from Only Human Press. Her chapbook, Selachimorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015.