I submitted this to a math poetry contest a while back and got honorable mention! I figured I’d share it here too.

Scratch Paper

Each sheet, a battlefield of crossed-out lines,

arrows veering nowhere, circles chasing dreams.

Three hours deep, seventeen pages sprawled—

my proof still wrong, but now wrong in new ways.

Like archeology in reverse, I stack

layers of failure, each attempt preserved

in smudged graphite and coffee rings.

The answer is here somewhere, buried

beneath epsilon neighborhoods and

desperate margin calculations.

My professor makes it look effortless,

chalk lines flowing like water.

But here in my dorm at 3 AM,

drowning in crumpled attempts,

I remember reading how Erdős

filled notebooks before finding truth.

So I reach for one more blank page,

knowing that ugly paths sometimes lead

to the most beautiful places.