2002 Summer Edition, Conceptions

She can't get out of the bookstore fast enough,
carries a volume of short stories and a recording
of symphonies by Schumann who had Eusebius
and Florestan arguing in his head and died
of anorexia in a German hospital.
She smells bacon frying. Fractals drift
from an inverted ice cream cone in front of her eyes.
Mandelbrot, but she can’t find his name.
Bach plays in the telescoping corridor.
On the escalator, her great toe slips from her sandal,
peels open on the steel grid.
She wraps toilet paper around her foot to escape
without leaving a trail, she can make it to the car--
his name Mandelbrot, Mandelbrot, The Mandelbrot Set
pristine as a fugue flutters in her temporal lobe,
that ecstatic little ping, the aura of seizure.

about the poet:
Rebecca Loudon lives on the west coast where she writes, plays the violin and throws rocks at tourists.