So, I explain that Poincaré posited that

‘Every simply connected, closed,

         three-dimensional manifold is

     homeomorphic to the sphere.’

There’s a lot of spheres in the room for me to point at,

there’s three in the weird picture on the wall

all inoffensive flat colours that steamroll me into

a fourth.           There’s bouncy balls on the desk

      little rubber brains being kept in jars

        I want to knock them off and watch them sprawl

          into round pools like how my blood might, were

my head to make contact with the kitchen floor.

    I think I’ve already chipped my skull into a sphere

taught my cheekbones roundness with the chisel

of my palm. I tell her my body

has no space for all this anger that it

flows out of me that maybe it becomes me,

that the mirror has a stranger trapped in it

  and it hates me. It wants to get out. It hates its square edges.

She asks me        if I’ve tried makeup.

I wonder if I could

break all my ribs and

  make them back up into

spheres.

    Poincaré asked if such a thing existed

That it could be finite and boundless

but not spherical eventually.

     She is pretending to know who Poincaré is.

If I curl my hand into a fist

a sphere blooms like a recalcitrant iris.

I imagine my hands disintegrating into

globules of steel,   ball bearings that drop to the floor

     I’ll lose up to my elbows and then my whole chest.

The room must begin somewhere, where my body ends,

I cannot find that point.

She tells me my chakras are out of whack.

    I wonder what the solar plexus is,

how it’s curvature might be defined,

        whether when I shrink myself down I’ll find it,

a peach pit at my centre, bursting like a water balloon.

  maybe this is like when I tried to teach myself set theory from Wikipedia

and I mistook abelian groups for some type of jungle flora,

If I pull my skin tight enough

around myself eventually I’ll become a sphere,

prove Poincaré and the girls I grew up with right.

The counsellor tells me she doesn’t get why I keep bringing Poincaré up.

He has nothing to tell me about selfhood.

But Poincaré understands

   how I can flatten my edges until I fit

within the fishbowl of girlhood, all the bulbous eyes outside

    winch me open like a skylight and he is offering me a padlock.

If I could make myself a sphere I could be whole,

I could be real, feet planted on the ground not three metres in the air,

‘I want to be a person,’ I tell her,

She says she can’t help me,      every session ends like this.

I buy another book about great unsolved maths problems,

thinking I might find a hundred dead women, with scowls like mine,

on page seven. I roll a ball of bluetack between my fingers,

making and unmaking a sphere.