Lynn McGee
Domain and Range
My student who has aged out of foster care and lives
in a group home in Manhattan is scolded awake at five a.m.
and told to peel down posters from the room she shares
with two other teenage girls.
Staff on 12-hour shifts go back to their morning shows
and coffee while a team of painters in speckled boots
wield brushes that bleach the baby-blue of dreams,
the sunshine yellow of wishful thinking to a shade white
as the inside of a milk carton, the cool white
of containment.
That’s why she’s late, my student says, and leans her lanky
frame in the doorway of our counselor’s office.
She is late more often than not, and she’s the best at math
we’ve got, undisputed queen of calculus. No arbitrary
point eludes her. She sizes up curves like most people
size up tomatoes in the produce section.
All functions are continuous, and this gives her hope.
She has a dozen mechanical pencils and a graphing calculator
in her makeup bag. She hits me up for lotion, hair scrunchies
and coins for the vending machine.
She stands transfixed by our counselor’s sure-footed,
maternal beauty, her switch from school rules to a rant
about her own kids, who ambush her with snowballs
and skid on the kitchen floor.
White flakes add ambience to her story.
They spatter the window, waking something resolute
as a seed in my student who wants to calibrate her destiny,
starting with the color of her own room. She tames
the queasy scale of slope, relentless rates of change.
She stops mid-sentence, to watch the blizzard.
Snow piles against the sill, and hushes traffic
six stories down, an entire city slowed by the energy
of those particles; their speed, their range.
Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.
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