Circle of Silence -- and sexual harassment

       Colonel Stacey K. Vargas is a professor of Physics at the Virginia Military Institute.  I found her poem -- with its vicious circles -- in the wonderful and provocative anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter:  Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, edited by Carolyne Wright, M. L. Lyons, and Eugenia Toledo (Lost Horse Press, 2015).

Circle of Silence     by Stacey K. Vargas

Like an electron trapped in an unstable orbit, I am seated in a circle of powerful men. 
In an awkward moment small talk ends and the meeting abruptly begins.
The superintendent turns to me and says, "This was not sexual harassment."
I turn to the inspector general and say, "After everything you heard in this investigation, 
       you find this acceptable?"
The inspector general turns to my department head but remains silent. 

Women occupy mathematics

     Poems thrive on imagery created from specific (rather than vague) details -- and numbers and other math terms are very specific!  Below I present several samples of mathematical imagery in poems from an excellent and important recent anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter:  Women Poets Occupy the Workspace.

Here are the opening lines of "Circle of Silence" by Stacey K. Vargas:

     Like an electron trapped in an unstable orbit, I am seated 
                           in a circle of powerful men.
     In an awkward moment small talk ends 
                           and the meeting abruptly begins.
     The superintendent turns to me and says, 
                           "This was not sexual harassment."

And the opening lines of "The Typist" by Barbara Drake:

     I made 87 1/2 cents an hour typing,
     when I was a college student.