Nine Reed-Mera

Decimals

They were all shells; elimias and conchs 

to be delivered to the Sonoran Paleontology Center off the accelerator’s outer ring. 

It was there that the geologists and mathematicians 

tried to fit golden rectangles 

and Fibonacci spirals 

into the scaffolding that holds creatures together. 

But no matter how hard they distorted, the decimals 

spilled out the sides of the ammonites, math running off reality like water, 

biology refusing to conform 

to geometry.

Katie Farris on Nine Reed-Mera

I appreciated the playful way that the author of “Decimals” incorporated biology, mathematics, and philosophy into the poem—it gives the piece an ecopoetic tilt, showing how life defies—even in its fossils—simple definition, measurement, hypothesis. The combination of abstract concepts and concrete details in lines like “the decimals/ spilled out the sides of the ammonites” creates dynamic figurative language that makes the poem engaging on multiple levels.

Nine Reed-Mera is a Spanish-American writer, freediver, and bug-lover studying creative writing and microbiology at Bard College. Nine’s writing has been published in the Lumiere Review, the The Dillydoun Review, and the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, among others. Nine is a National Silver Medalist in Writing and a YoungArts winner in Fiction, and her work has been published in the YoungArts 2022 Anthology. In her writing, there is a playful tension between science and poetry, between the architecture of scientific knowledge and the flow of life.