Jessica Dubey
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Jessica Dubey is a poet living in upstate New York. She was a 2018 nominee for a Best of the Net Award. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals including Oxidant | Engine, The American Journal of Poetry, ragazine.cc, and is forthcoming in IthacaLit.
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The New Math
I couldn’t help my children
with the new math all those
unfamiliar
steps
to get
to the same answer
Such fussiness with remainders
teaching them how to carry over
Now all those
new children
who go to school
steep learning curves
weighing them
down
like Kevlar backpacks
All those ballistic lessons they have to commit
to memory The active killer kits
with tourniquets they have to turn turn turn
to stop the loss The choices
they have to make how to be
battlefield ready and what to do
with all those remainders
with the new math all those
unfamiliar
steps
to get
to the same answer
Such fussiness with remainders
teaching them how to carry over
Now all those
new children
who go to school
steep learning curves
weighing them
down
like Kevlar backpacks
All those ballistic lessons they have to commit
to memory The active killer kits
with tourniquets they have to turn turn turn
to stop the loss The choices
they have to make how to be
battlefield ready and what to do
with all those remainders
Commentary
Jessica on "The New Math":
Never as a child, even with my overactive imagination, did I ever envision a gunman breaking through the doors of my school. My children were young when the Columbine High School shootings occurred, but even then the massacre felt like a distant, isolated incident.
I remember at the height of the AIDS epidemic hearing that eventually everyone would know someone personally affected by HIV. Now, I think that eventually all of us will know a victim of a mass shooting. It’s a terrible thought to entertain.
While all of the school shootings are difficult to comprehend, the one at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, was particularly gut wrenching. We bear the scars of this violence, if not on our bodies, in our psyche, children especially so.
This poem was inspired in part by a 60 Minutes episode about a campaign called “Stop the Bleed,” an effort to make first responders out of ordinary citizens, including children. Bleeding kits, or as they are often referred to as “active killer kits,” include tourniquets, gauze and a chest seal like those used in battlefield scenarios.
Consulting Editor Tim Lear on "The New Math":
The opening lines unfold in a relaxed manner, and the domestic setting and light tone reminded me of a Billy Collins poem. But the poem's familiarity and my initial reflex to treat the speaker's revelation as comic and nostalgic soon fades. Dubey's fluid line breaks become unsettling and suggestive (I drew a link to Newtown, for instance, that could have felt forced or cheap but didn't), and the ominous turn is enhanced by the harsh alliteration ("active killer kits") and unrestrained repetition ("turn turn turn"). Yet the tourniquets infinite turning, like adult hand wringing and politiking, accomplishes nothing -- there is no stopping the loss, an end foreshadowed in the poem's opening line ("I couldn't help").
After I read "The New Math" I had to look up the definition of a "remainder," my math being poor however it's defined and dated. And I learned that it's an equation "where the pieces don't exactly fit," where "a part of something is left over when other parts have been completed, used, or dealt with." The irony in Dubey's poem is that very little has been dealt with. And the sadness is that we're what's left over.
Never as a child, even with my overactive imagination, did I ever envision a gunman breaking through the doors of my school. My children were young when the Columbine High School shootings occurred, but even then the massacre felt like a distant, isolated incident.
I remember at the height of the AIDS epidemic hearing that eventually everyone would know someone personally affected by HIV. Now, I think that eventually all of us will know a victim of a mass shooting. It’s a terrible thought to entertain.
While all of the school shootings are difficult to comprehend, the one at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, was particularly gut wrenching. We bear the scars of this violence, if not on our bodies, in our psyche, children especially so.
This poem was inspired in part by a 60 Minutes episode about a campaign called “Stop the Bleed,” an effort to make first responders out of ordinary citizens, including children. Bleeding kits, or as they are often referred to as “active killer kits,” include tourniquets, gauze and a chest seal like those used in battlefield scenarios.
Consulting Editor Tim Lear on "The New Math":
The opening lines unfold in a relaxed manner, and the domestic setting and light tone reminded me of a Billy Collins poem. But the poem's familiarity and my initial reflex to treat the speaker's revelation as comic and nostalgic soon fades. Dubey's fluid line breaks become unsettling and suggestive (I drew a link to Newtown, for instance, that could have felt forced or cheap but didn't), and the ominous turn is enhanced by the harsh alliteration ("active killer kits") and unrestrained repetition ("turn turn turn"). Yet the tourniquets infinite turning, like adult hand wringing and politiking, accomplishes nothing -- there is no stopping the loss, an end foreshadowed in the poem's opening line ("I couldn't help").
After I read "The New Math" I had to look up the definition of a "remainder," my math being poor however it's defined and dated. And I learned that it's an equation "where the pieces don't exactly fit," where "a part of something is left over when other parts have been completed, used, or dealt with." The irony in Dubey's poem is that very little has been dealt with. And the sadness is that we're what's left over.
