Poems from alumna Mary-Sherman Willis’s (poetry, ’05) forthcoming book, Graffiti Calculus (CW Books, November 2013), appear online at The Cortland Review:

Kilroy (from Graffiti Calculus)

In my Cold War duck-and-cover American girlhood, in the bull’s-eye
of Washington’s nuclear radius,

under a blue sky etched in contrails and filled with the keening of air
emergency sirens, in brick-walled

Horace Mann Elementary, Mrs. Wilson drew her chalk across the board.
Let AB be a line segment with midpoint M.

Let two small semicircles X and Y rise above AB; a parabola Z below AB;
and a large semicircle L, above X and Y….

And I doodled this charm: now let two little eyeballs fill X and Y! And two
sets of cartoon fingertips below AB!

KILROY WAS HERE, I wrote, and because I could, I let AB become the

horizon of the whole Earth,

flexing along lines of longitude and latitude from sea to shining sea. Hail
Empire’s wandering warrior, king killer….