(Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash)

The little boy shouts “To infinity and beyond!”

and asks “Where the heck is infinity?”

and “Is a googol bigger than a gazillion?”

and “How can there be a biggest number?

Doesn’t the whole entire world have room

for 1 or 2 or 3 more?”

and “How can there be something littler than zero?”

She tells him: snowflakes, grains of sand, chess moves,

broken promises, teardrops and raindrops,

stars and universes, seeds in dandelion puffs

floating in a summer breeze. All jumbled together.

He closes his eyes. “I’m trying to see a gazillion

gazelles!” She wonders how math people can talk

to each other when they can’t even agree

on whether a billion is a million millions

or a thousand millions. “False friends,” they say.

She closes her eyes and sees—tears

flowing over broken promises,

becoming part of the air,

drizzling back up into the clouds,

and showering down again next January

in a googol’s worth of raindrops—

plus 1 or 2 or 3.

She doesn’t know what

to tell the boy

about zero.

Judy Brackett Crowe lives in the California foothills of the northern Sierra Nevada. Her poems have appeared in Fish Anthology 2022, California Fire & Water, EPOCH, the Maine Review, Commonweal, Midwest Review, Cloudbank, Subtropics, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is author of The Watching Sky (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and Flat Water: Nebraska Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2019).

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Published in the January 2021 issue: View Contents
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