At either end were heavy floodgates, dropwalls of thickly forged iron. At different points in the day, according to no particular rhythm that anyone on the Fifth ever managed to figure, those gates would close, and the chamber would be flooded.

Hannah mumbled in a sarcastic icy tone. Woopty doo, she thought.

The donkey was bellowing because the Two-Time Kid […] was in the process of sodomizing it, and even for a docile donkey, there are limits.

Some poems, echoing the purpose of early poetic treatises on scientific principles, attempt to elucidate the mathematical concepts that underlie prime numbers. Others play with primes’ cultural associations. Still others derive their structure from mathematical patterns involving primes.