Imagine me as a child
with a measuring tape
borrowed from my mother’s sewing basket

and it was yellow on one side and
grey-white on the other.

Imagine me stretching it
across the dining room table
and realizing 57 inches lengthwise
but 64 on the diagonal.

From protractor and compass,
I learned to extract the area
of a figure and express the value.

My hand was so many inches long before it grew.
My loneliness was measured in square yards.
The co-sine of my longing became
my latitude and
I could find its position from
the angle of another person’s moon.
This was and is and will become
my geometry,
my way of saying
that I was here
for so long
and for so often
and it will never be enough.

Stretched from end to end,
each of my emotions might
or might not circle the earth.

__________________________________________________________________________ Robert Masterson is the author of Garnish Trouble (Finishing Line, 2012) and Artificial Rats & Electric Cats (Camber, 2008). He is an English professor at the City University of New York. ‘The Distance Between These Things’ is a finalist for The Best Short Writing in the World 2011 and is nominated by Fleeting for the Pushcart Prize 2012.