Parabola Is the Most Beautiful Word in the English Language | Sirianna Helleloid

There are things I want to distraction & things
I never want. Let the y-axis be the sex feelings of A & B.

Let the x-axis be time. The equation solved for A
is a sine wave. The equation solved for B is a cosine wave.

A & B cross at zero interest in the other’s charms.
Imagine a graph: the person who lives in my brain

desires that which is unknown, until she looks left
when she should have looked right to see a car.

She started a race, but her feet were problems that concrete
was unable to solve. A woman stood behind another woman

& at an angle their bodies merged & looked a lump sum
of one body, flesh open on the flanks. Thus C & D are solved

to be collinear — chest to chest, hand to hand, eye to eye.
Some people have bodies in them. Some have a trapezius muscle

that needs a clean cut to release. I solved an equation:
I want a body. Not my body, not yours. I just want a body.

My equation postulates: E’s angles puncture F’s curves,
E’s hand is in F’s lungs, E’s feet sink into F’s stomach. A body

is a razor to wash & leave undried. Imagine a graph:
not a man, but a body to run my fingers through, a torso

to wrap with arms. Imagine: desire is a lion in tall grass. Imagine:
a body is a giraffe, is a smooth mannequin, without head or feet.

Sirianna Helleloid is a production accountant by day and by night is mostly asleep; somewhere between the two she writes. She’s had poems in Kettle Blue Review, Catapult, and JAKE. Her manuscript &maybe was recently a finalist for the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. You can find her on Twitter at @elelelelloyd.