The Students Write Poems for Their Teacher
The students write poems
like they are painting
in the filtered dust of a late-night studio.
They fling glorious globs
of paint on a canvas
they imagine.
It is abstract.
It is realistic.
It is impressionistic.
They don’t need to find language;
the paint will do it for them.
Yellow will scream metaphors;
brown, onomatopoeia.
Thick black lines are symbols;
red, the gash of simile.
On parent’s night
I hang them up,
(their poem-things)
and their parents respond viscerally
In the gallery of words theirs say
“This is what I mean”
inferred by the yellow stroke that leaps
from thought to word,
invoked by the word
that lolls on the black line of comprehension.
Incised by the red connection
linking me to you.
Seem Bright
Between
Thigh-light ellipses
To and for America
Eat mac ’n’ cheese
Or grilled cheese on
Pleather
Young mother
Makes living
Seem bright
Okay here in USA
Clownish gyrations
Young girl with urges
Slinks toward
Mayhem with child
Tell her, stop, and
Check with
Lauren Bacall
Later, breast
Nipple
Hard and drifting
Through years of
Soft dancing
Snake beads under
Skin that hungers toward a mouth
Slink back, sling out
When feet slide into scripted shoes
They yell for free farm love
To Le-Ann, Who Had a Heart Attack
On New Year’s Eve
My student
Legally blind
Had a heart attack
But that was after her eviction
Now she’s in rehab
Submitting her Master’s Thesis
To me for
Our sixteenth iteration
To Le-Ann, who had a heart attack
On New Year’s Eve
Who has more fight in her
Than a drill to the earth
Whom I carry like a wounded sack
Of mashed-up innards
Who will finish
Or finish me
To Le-Ann, berating me
Commanding that I read
Reread, re-tread, explain
Why I can’t make the world right
Why she is blind
Why her daughter’s on the spectrum
Why her veteran status
Can’t save her from the streets
Why Schlossberg’s theory of transition
Means shit in real life.
Should I Care
If an ambulance just
Cruised up my neighbor’s driveway
With flashing red lights
And no noise?
Yes,
But still
My night goes on
Maybe my neighbor
Will die like my husband did
Right there in the home
Right there on the couch
Slumped over
In the midst of eating some pineapple
We are all stopped short yet
Think the tune will carry us
Barbara is currently a professor at SUNY Empire State College, where she teaches in the school for graduate studies. She worked as a poet-in-the-schools in New York City for ten years, and formerly owned a children’s bookstore in Brooklyn Heights. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Alembic, The Binnacle, Black Buzzard Review, The Chaffin Journal, Confluence, Crack the Spine, Dos Passos Review, Drunk Monkeys, Edison Literary Review, Eleven Eleven, ellipsis…, Folly, Forge, FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry, The Griffin, Hiram Poetry Review, Home Planet News, Illya’s Honey, Juked, Kaleidoscope, Monarch Review, New Letters, The Old Red Kimono, Pearl, Phantasmagoria, The Pinch, riverSedge, Sanskrit, Serving House Journal, Slipstream, Spillway, The Tower Journal, Tulane Review, Westview, and other literary and academic journals.
