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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of cc&d magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

PRIME NUMBERS,

Richard Fein

they tease the obsessive in our natures.
A forever census is taken:
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and on and on through the centuries
beyond the sum of grains of sand or number of stars.
On parchment, rag paper, cheap printout, or screen pixels,
inventories are taken.
We are old when our years pass only two dozen of them.
But we’re positively compelled to find all these integers.
Is it their defiant indivisibility that taunts?
They’re divided only by themselves
and ONE, that ultimate unity.
They’re mileposts between here and infinity,
with always one more just ahead.
But how far ahead?
The answer is a tedious enumeration,
a measureless, marathon of measurement.
We defined the system, and the system torments us,
an open-ended, run-on numerical syntax
ever more countless than counted

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