CPR

Carol Dorf

The way one can bring another back to life—counting breaths and chest compressions—this fails more than it succeeds, leaving witnesses in a room full of hieroglyphs to decipher. At certain times we become so attuned to connotations, it is hard to understand the person across the table. A life of gestures distilled into a few sentences.

If the walls of the room filled with outlines of birds, no one would remark on their colors or even the turn of a wing.


Carol Dorf’s poetry has been published in Spillway, Sin Fronteras, Antiphon, Composite, About Place, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, Maintenant and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches mathematics at Berkeley High School.

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