Jeremy Rock​

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Base Numbers

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I know it’s tired, but it’s the holidays 

and I want to say something about the tenth 

being taken from a hundred to bring the rest 

in line. I keep thinking of the men, short-strawed 

 

and serving, standing in for a brother. Oh, decem, 

you’re in our sums and our seasons, the gaps 

where martyrs would stand, shaped like bakers 

or fathers in yards catching sons from the air 

 

made collateral. I want to explain the way I feel 

by year’s end, the scientific notation into which 

I’ve learned we’ve all been funneled and this family 

of language is in all of it. The point of that cut 

 

was never the dead soldiers, but how you’d always 

feel the loss just enough to push through it.

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