I. Problems of Addition

15 year old girlwoman weds 18 year old boyman
Given, the kind of love they make Hallmark films about,
one four room house, no phone, TV, indoor toilet or Netflix, calculate the intervals between the first four children.

(Answer: 3 years, 10 months, 15 days)

My grandmother bore four babies before she was 21,
a decade later, three more in twelve short months,
the mathematics of motherhood intensifying exponentially.

Follow up questions:
Diagram where seven children sleep in a two bedroom
house, accounting for exponential growth of adolescent legs and attitudes.

Estimate, to the nearest eight year old, how many
pairs of child limbs can nestle next to each other on a double mattress before someone gets pushed out, ten in the bed style.

Given 16 hours of summertime daylight and an average rainfall of 46 inches annually, will this season’s tobacco yield enough for new school clothes if Stewart grows more than two inches and Ellen needs four new skirts for college?

II. Compound Interest

Seven children yield seventeen grandchildren, 14 and counting great-grandkids, 1 double great. Graph the rate at which souls are added to the tiny family home. Keep a chart of their birthdays. Mail every card on time, ten dollars enclosed.

Christmases of fifty relations balancing plates precariously on laps, taking shifts outside to shepherd ever-growing flocks of offspring. Determine the probability of coming back from the bathroom to find your seat already snatched before it even got cold.
(Higher than 75% for sure.)

Measure the size of the arguments
caused by sharing everything, whether
you wanted to or not-–clothes, toys, food, space,
the precious real estate of Mama’s lap.

Measure the love, but find an infinite ruler does not exist.

III. Problems of Subtraction

Joyner’s is full today, the normally hushed funeral home
stretched to overflow as we lay my Uncle Willie to rest.

Pop quiz:

Divide the number of intentionally uncomfortable funeral
home sofas by the weight of weary hearts needing to lay burdens down.

Watch seven, the indivisible prime number
of my father’s childhood become six, a number too easily
split by twos or threes. Six is vulnerable, fragile, perishable.

Find the limit of my aunt’s grief as she buries husband after son, stands next to daughter, holds great-grandbaby and kisses the love of her life goodbye. (Answer: the limit does not exist.)

Graph the point on the coordinate plane where the impact of a life well lived intersects an existence too soon cut short.

Evaluate whether we loved enough to last
the time we’ve yet to go without him.
Measure my dad’s stride as he walks up to me and my sisters,
measure his syllables as he says, says “One of us will
have to do this for all of the others”.

Realize the function of h health over t time
is rendered both blessing and burden.

Who wants to bury their siblings?
But who wants to be the first to go?
(Explain your answer—show your work here.)

Thirteen words, more mortality mathematics I
can’t divide out of my head. The singular thought of kissing
each of my own sisters goodbye, of standing alone on that marshy funeral home fake-grass, a lone point on an axis that is undeterminable without the triangle of my siblings.

It’s division by zero.