just like this poor limb
reaching from the grave for life
our Girl Scout dream ends
loss
WTF
“What the fuck–?!” She shoots a dirty look across the room, in the same space I have been standing watching with my own eyes as I monitor their ability to read sentences, their ability to respond to questions. “What did you throw?”
I have seen nothing. Not a speck, not a spitball, not an airplane.
“Can you tell me what—?” I begin, and am harshly interrupted by her friend whose phone I took away yesterday, who argued with me and cussed at me and told me that I should give her my phone if I was going to take hers, who said I don’t pay her bills and have no right to her property–“So you’re gonna ask her about what happened when he’s the one who did it?”
“I’m trying to figure out what happened. F, can you tell me?”
But before she can answer, all I hear is, slightly under her breath but loud enough so she knows I hear it, “Yeah, that’s right, she’s a racist.”
I call the boy outside, a boy who has sat in my class for two years and has never allowed a cruel word to cross his lips, and ask him about throwing the paper, which he adamantly denies, but I can hardly hear his response as I am already swimming in a pool of tears that sits just behind my eyelids, ready to fall loosely down into the hole that is this day.
Because I either say the wrong thing or make the wrong choice or don’t say anything at all, and none of it is ever right. Because I spend my life trying to be fair to all of my students, to all of the people in my life, even when they are not fair to me.
Because sometimes it feels like nothing I do will ever bring positivity, love, friendship, or trust into my life.
Because I was already crying before this class even began. After two months of planning, paperwork, training, money, and time, before we’ve even had a single meeting, my Girl Scout co-leader has just informed me that her daughters don’t want to do Girl Scouts and therefore, neither does she.
Because I promised my daughters that we could do this after a four-year break.
Because I’m terrible at making friends, and I feel like it is multi-generational, as my girls have struggled in recent weeks to click with her daughters despite the last three years of friendship. And I wanted to bridge that gap between the girls and their old friends and the mother who has warmed up to me, and build a foundation for something that could last for years.
Because I don’t have the right words, when I’m standing there watching a kid cuss in my class or at happy hour telling people what I really think, to do anything more than make people hate me.
“R, you don’t have your tablet today, do you need the paper copy of the book?” I try, several minutes later, a pathetic attempt at peace.
“Don’t even try to talk to me, Miss.”
Don’t even try.
Because, why should I? I got married when I was twenty years old and made my husband the center of my entire life. And whenever I try to reach outside of that safe bubble I built up for myself, I am misjudged, blamed, ostracized.
Because, the truth is, he is my one and only friend. And when I get a text at lunch as I’m walking around the gray-eyed dressed-up-for-autumn park, I have no one to share my sad news with once I arrive back to my school.
I have no one to call to talk through it.
No one but him.
And I spend so many moments of my days worrying that my daughters will face the same fate, the same insecurities as they enter adulthood. Which is exactly why I wanted to start the Girl Scout troop in the first place–to help them make and continue their friendships. “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold…” The tune of the song will forever be emblazoned on my soul.
Yet, no matter how hard I have tried, people have left my life for one “circumstantial” reason after another. And once they leave, they leave an abscess that I pathetically try to fill with a new set of… friends. Colleagues? Girls’ friends’ parents? Bueller? Bueller?
This is me, standing in front of my class, trying to hold together another day of teaching, another day of being a mother, a wife, another day of trying, and failing, to be a friend. And I may as well be the monotonous voice that no one listens to, searching in the dark for something that was never there in the first place.
Because I have heard nothing. Not a speck, not a word, not an offer. And I want to be like that brazen 14-year-old and shout out, “What the fuck?”
Only. I want an answer. Not a scapegoat.
Unhappy Hour
It is a long and teary hug at happy hour
Between friends who share life’s moments–
The cold and the hot, the dark and the light–
And you can see it all in their bright faces
When they pull apart from each other.
So here i am in the dark corner, watching,
The outside of the table jabbing my ribs,
My drink taken away before i’d finished,
My mouth dry and with no one to talk to
And feeling quite like a girl at a middle school dance.
And after everything that i have built up
In the past twenty years–my marriage,
My career, my traveling, my three young girls–
I haven’t built up a friendship that would
Ever offer me such a hug.
The loneliness clings to the edges of my days
As my girls begin to find their place in the world,
Spending all afternoon up the street, online,
Arranging one social event or read fest after another,
Needing me less and less.
And that is why this happy hour stings my soul
As clusters share their weekend party plans,
Their impending wedding reception,
Their last escapade at the dancing dive bar…
None of which have or will include me.
And on year four in this place where my students’ love
Fills my days with hope for a better future,
I still have a longing, an inkling of loss
That trails behind me, wishing i could be someone else,
Someone worthy enough to be a friend.
The Terror of Being Female
i can’t believe our world this week–
surrounded by the same chauvinistic bullshit
my liberal baby-boomer parents raised me up against.
and it’s 2016 and i have three daughters and a man, a husband,
a born-and-bred Southern Baptist-raised Tennesseean, whose thoughts couldn’t enter the realm of filth so flippantly tossed
into the national spectrum
and we have a First Lady
who should be our Queen
whose words get twisted on my newsfeed within twenty-four hours
by. A. White. Man.
and i want to grab the world by its ears and shake some sense into it and put him in a swimming pool at age thirteen and have a hand slide up into his swimsuit.
and put him on a bicycle at age fourteen and on the middle of a spring day have a creeper follow him home and chase him into an alley and expose himself to him.
and i want to put him in the college library at age sixteen and have a stalker creep up behind him trying to reach up his shorts when he’s just searching for a poem by William Blake.
And I want him to go fuck himself and his white male privilege that I have never seen in my home–the home of my birth or my marriage–even in all its whiteness
And I want him to feel that terror of being female. Because every woman I know has had icy blood running through her veins in those moments of harassment and assault that have plagued us for all of time.
But he won’t. Trump won’t apologize and he would argue till the day runs dark, and all i can do is pray to a god i don’t believe in that my three daughters don’t face the same fate. That they will find a home as safe as mine with a man as good as my father or husband and a world better than the one we have set before them now.
Because it’s all i can do. Because i moved away in the pool and told my father about the flasher and left that library.
Because i’m writing this now and somewhere in the world eyes are reading it and taking one moment to hear that terror slip out of my veins and transform into the truth that makes me Silent. No. More.
Bricklaying
yesterday we learned about sod
and homesteaders’ dreams being trampled by wind and hail and no water
and how they were tricked into
settling on free land.
nothing is free.
how they built brick by sod brick–
tiny houses not much taller than themselves,
and posed in front with shovels on the roof,
no time to take them down for the picture–
for what if it rained, or a snake crept in?
yesterday i thought i was a teacher,
and they were learning from me,
my immigrant students building up their vocabulary
brick by decoded brick.
nothing is ever what it seems.
today they entered and i asked them to write:
describe challenges when you moved to a new place.
and with the new words fresh on her tongue, she told me:
just like the homesteaders,
my family had to move to a new camp
and my father had to build a sod house,
no taller than that one in the picture.
and so my student taught today’s lesson:
one hundred fifty years later,
we are still making bricks
instead of trying to break them.
First Day of Middle School
gone far too quickly
are my two little chickies
growing up too fast
Lost and Found
you couldn’t steal this:
ancient homes, history learned,
survivors by cliff
or these sweet faces
of my three girls, unafraid
to face your world
no, you can’t take that;
my identity’s in words
found here. not with you.
Day Twenty, Road Trip 2016
in the man’s big house
they built him a three-room suite;
his children lived here:
remnants of slave life:
hard-hitting and far-reaching
(Black Lives Matter. Now?)
they dug up red clay
to lay every brick … by brick,
by breaking their backs
his famous status:
founder of freedom, writer
(declared our country)
brick by brick by brick
he laid his lies and kept his slaves
and wrote our future
and we swallow it
and throw coins at his gravestone
and try to forgive
they all shared this view–
from the big house; the slave house;
the land formed by God
and so we move on,
brick by brick by road by road
to see its beauty
Day Fourteen, Road Trip 2016
Girl Scout Headquarters
mixed with colonial wealth
(built on the slaves’ backs)
sometimes beauty’s marred
history’s hard to swallow
amid perfect squares
yet we walk through it
splashing, playing giant chess,
our steps going on
pieces of our past
even when they’re earned with blood
mark a clear future:
we can absorb this,
take pics, eat gator, and grin,
hoping we’ve moved on
(though the shadows know
of King Cotton, oppressed girls,
Sherman’s burning march)
we can’t have it all
the vacation, family… peace
without the whole truth
we can just love them
hope they never see the dark
(only the beauty)
Day Four, Road Trip 2016
on a perfect day
with music following us
on every corner
i sometimes get trapped
in thoughts of poverty, loss
(also on corners)
my girls all grinning
taking pics and buying gifts–
the perfect white life
yet anger jumps out
from car windows and bar doors,
a cruel reminder:
we’re not all equal.
some of us can ride trolleys,
take month-long road trips.
others beg for change
with thin plastic drinking cups
that they’ll fill later
in all this joy: grief.
vacations are like heaven
mixed with sorrow
Step Write Up 