Skip to main content

Improv 1, Week 10

Three, Becoming Spring

On the urban grid of three PM she is
off it—the bus just huffing from the curb, she
lifts her backpack over her head, then brings it
down dead weight, full speed to the ground. By its straps
she heaves it up and down again. What’s in it
she wants to kill? What’s in you that wants her to
kill it? To KO the Collected Shakespeare,
the Xmas knitting, the kittens, the bloody
fetus? You want to help, help make it stop, help
make it go. But in the ritual movement
of three PM she is an errant woodwind
outside the score. Where did it go, the good you
believed was inside everything? She’s thrown it
down. She won’t carry your faith on her back.

------------------------

Every period at :45 he begs for initials in his agenda—
he claims to require the restroom, though what he needs
is cranberry juice and a check-up. What is it that he pisses out,
shits, throws up, or splooges? What’s in me
that wants to find out? I want to save every student
from anything that might do them harm.
You have to save every student, make the attempt,
it’s your fault if they don’t learn, differentiate,
when all else fails, else being 3/4ths of the class.
Where did you go wrong? Mid planning of lesson?
First days of school when you forgot to set rules or
maybe it’s the seating chart. You’re asking for trouble
sitting those two beside each other. Trouble, grace me
with your presence, create an unstoppable tag team of these two.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improv 1, Week 9

Script Folio 43 Split pomegranate, common rhinoceros beetle, Scarlet Turks='s cap lily folding back it's red lips while anthers circle the pistil's one hand: above them six lines are written in chancery script with lettere tagliate , letters cut like the long lines of pasta our parents cut on our plate, the work of two people who never met. The two halves of each letter--below and above-- are severed or sewn together by inked chain links like those that knot a fence or a stitch that unravels the whole length of a sentence if a stray thread is pulled--chain letter, chain gang, chain mail, chain saw-- or those paper links that wrap themselves around the Xmas tree: eentsy weentsy spider sidling up to each letter, each word, casting and binding in silk as if to ravel and unravel once felt the same. ---------------------------- Food Foods were eaten like the grossness our parents turned into freedom tickets away from the kitchen table, the alteration of rules we didn’t know exis...
Post a Comment
Read more

Improv 1, Week 7

“Grounding” by Sandra Meek 5th and 6th Stanza […]That summer, retracing my parents’ younger lives, I drove past the red-stone mental hospital where they’d worked, through what use to be countryside, good rock hunting, now a clutter of suburban yards, bricked fences. What I learned from my father: it’s stasis that kills, and face cards are always the ones to keep. From my mother: self is just what doesn’t leave you. What I taught myself between flights, to orbit any celestial stone is to lose everything but direction. On the margin of a neighborhood going up, the only roses I unearthed were failed partial blooms: one side ridged, the other smooth as an Amish doll’s face the maker leaves unfeatured to avoid sin, the graven image. As if God didn’t know to go any deeper. --------------------- One vacation, transcribing my earlier trips to beaches, I crept over black sand, sea weed, and shells into the ocean where Uncle Scott tossed me like an inflatable boy. A cold Great Lake: just jump in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Junkyard Quotes 31-35, Week 7

"If you're still planning on teaching, you'll need passion and Xanax." A teacher asks me daily if I am still considering teaching, as if the students I deal with could scare me away. This was the most recent response after I said I still planned to teach. ---------------- "'No Child Left Behind' doesn't mean no child left behind HERE." While criticizing what the government and school systems pass down, this comment was thrown out. Some people in charge seem to misunderstand the doctrine, passing kids that they would rather not deal with on to the high school where they will continue to fail. ---------------- "He's just so lazy; slow as molasses. If he was molasses, he wouldn't even run down hill." My supervising teacher made this comment about a student that gets A's one day every couple of weeks. He is smart, but dislikes most types of work. ---------------- "If one of us said, Andy, when Andy wasn't there, that si...
Post a Comment
Read more