by Ariel Friedman
you ask me at bedtime
on your fourth birthday
and when I say no, no
one lives forever
and you say, but numbers go forever,
my mind traces the imagined
course of your life—eight-year-old turned
teenager, gangly kid in a dorm
turned twenty-something in a queen
bed, cuddled with the shadowy figure of not-me
until you are old, older
than me—and suddenly I am not
in the picture: a pencil drawing of us, me
erased, and it takes some time
to soar back into my body
next to you on your bed on the floor
in my bedroom, a place I can’t imagine
you’ll ever leave—
I tell you yes. Numbers go
forever. Squint, and you’ll see them curl
over the horizon, carrying
the future in their tiny mathematical hands.
Someday, I tell you, we’ll look
down at them, or maybe up, our essences
scattered like light through a prism into anything but numbers
Ariel Friedman is a multi-genre cellist, composer, songwriter, and poet. Her poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, december, Literary Mama, Bodega, and Lucky Jefferson, among others and she is the author of the chapbook, the universe digests her stars (Bottlecap Press, 2024). She is a winner of the 2023 Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program and has been nominated for 2023 Best New Poets and a 2022 Pushcart Prize. She performs and tours with award-winning sister chamber-folk duo, Ari & Mia, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project; was a winner of the 2020 Women Composers Festival of Hartford’s call for scores; and a recipient of New England Conservatory’s 2018 Alumni Award. She lives in Boston with her husband and two children. Find her at www.arielfriedmanmusic.com.