Weather Report
with a line from Dickinson
Truth is good Health—and Safety, and the sky, but believing
myself injured—a click of bone, a turn of mind—I travel
all November with care, or wariness, between desks.
The wood element, my teacher warns, when I try to be less
angry. The truth is I’m full of accidents and furies
this semester. I curl around sounds like my body thinks
it can slow their passage. When gunshots are reported
on campus, we pretend distance protects us. Truth remains
—a winter gray sky, sometimes eased or broken
by the flight of crows.
The Gray Mare
A day in the classroom, smiling hard,
and I mirror too well the gray mare—speckled
and frantic with bravery. We rush at fences,
eager for any hurdle to be over. I haven’t learned
yet to breathe and balance us, to bend and supple
this frenzy of trying too hard. Trying and trying
for a better approach, the right distance, we wheel
through our own dust. Nervous and bighearted, both
of us—most of us, I’ll think, circling desks all week.
My students too are trying, speed-stricken, to get
the measure of this course, this world. We scramble
to prove we can scramble. What if instead we let
ourselves into the field, stepped out quiet
and hungry, to graze under the rising moon?
Burnout with Rain and Possum
I want so badly to quit when it crosses
my path home—bald tail and grimed fur
in the gleam of headlights, not playing dead.
Rain has laid a silver glare on the road, left
me anxious and cold after a day of trying
to sort essays made by students from summaries
made by AI. A monotony of regurgitated facts,
tidy but tractionless. My mind’s an ugly thing
now, limbic, full of angry static. Lonely too,
the way roomfuls of apathy will make you—or lack
of contact with the inner world, lack of human
tasks. Does the possum register the nothing
I’ve got left? Uncanny scuttler, it refuses to flee
or freeze, but startles me into braking. It moves
off the road, but follows me uphill like a curse
or decision, all claws and syllables.
Situational Awareness
a microphone, and shouts the whole way through her talk.
It’s our final day of school and sunshine pours
through the auditorium windows, catching the backs
of our red folding chairs. Does she warn us first or launch
right into a rape attempt? A mugging? I’m on the edge
of the left row, near the front. My feet can reach the gap
in the carpet, which has been growing steadily wider all year
as we pull nervous chains of fiber from it. Drop your wallet
if that’s all they want. Strike first if possible. Surprise
your attacker. At what point are we mesmerized
despite the warm room, the pool party ahead?
She tells us we are capable of more than we think,
that the key is to act confident like you know
where you’re going. We turn our heads to watch her pace
across the stage. Keep track of anyone who follows you.
Let them know you know they’re there—cut them a glare—
but don’t rush, never panic. I perch my feet on the bar
of the chair ahead. We could be grabbed by our hair,
by our backpacks. We could be beaten, kidnapped,
or—post-Columbine—shot at our desks. We should be prepared
at all times to play dead or to tackle an assailant, not with punches
as we see on TV, but with a hand chop to the windpipe.
Or knee to groin. You can grab a gun by the barrel, a knife
by the blade. She tells us to practice while unloading dishes,
to start with butter knives. I still hear her when I leave events,
unpartnered, tracking the brightest path to my car. It’s riveting
to be given permission to curse and shout. But I’m learning too
that my freeze-instinct is a liability; if the self is a thing that needs
defending, then freedom’s a dangerous enterprise. Situational
awareness is seeing all potential threats. Restless pubescent currents
fill the room, ready to swarm for the pool, full of unspoken laws.
I grow warier by the minute of all the things adults did and do
to prepare us for the world or in the name of it. The room churns
with our hundred little dramas; yesterday’s tests sit ready
to be marked. The cop talks herself hoarse, telling us things
we might survive. The speech goes on for years. Scenarios bloom
and vanish. Rules unspool across every campus. Never drink
anything you haven’t seen opened or mixed. Move like a spy
and maintain situational awareness. Our teachers watch
from the back. A beat of silence follows her speech,
then a sharp burst of applause.
Translations
it hard to track verbs and conjugations,
much less all the pesky tenses. Trucks pass,
too. The sky pales gradually like a screen
adjusted. I couldn’t sleep despite the birds’
silence. So today this self is something like her
blurred reflection on the window over my desk;
I/we keep relocating by degrees or memory:
Ohio, l’ecole. Now that the shadows are trees
and growing leaves, the bees fly [blank] them
—that was the mnemonic for prepositions
in middle school. Et moi/and I, am I,
between flashcards, an extension
of my past? Still half-awake, wanting to be
in the woods, wishing I knew what I needed
to memorize, finding this ‘self’ again
a syllable—that stable, that fleeting.
