Eighteen Years of Solitude
Get in at four to prep the store. Toast
your twentieth muffin at six as your wife
unlocks the doors. Swat a cutter onto the grill,
crack an egg into it. Drip two drops of water,
simmer. Scoop the egg onto the muffin bottom
and top it off with cheese, grilled ham, and
the muffin top. Wrap. You could replicate this
five hundred times a day every day until
Easy St., but cooking’s just to make money.
Playing with prime numbers is to live.
Your sandwich has five layers. Five is prime
and every odd prime contains the letter ‘e’,
like three and five, as do words like be the bee,
bet the beet. Seven has two and freebie three.
Your SB, MA, MS, JD, and PhD have none,
though degree has three. You’ve no clue where
this is heading, but you’re not giving up. Bees
evolved from crabs, and this poem is about
how you fly in life. There’s no greatest prime,
no deadline except urgency, which has one ‘e’.
• • •
K
enton K. Yee’s recent poems appear in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, RHINO, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, BoomerLitMag, Plume Poetry, Rattle, Best Microfiction 2026, and other venues. His debut poetry chapbook is expected from Bull City Press in 2027. Kenton holds a PhD in theoretical physics from UCLA and law and economics degrees from Stanford. He taught at Columbia University and writes from Northern California. FB: @scrambled.k.eggs INSTA: @kentonkyeepoet