by Diane Mierzwik
These are some of the notes I collected during the 2011-2012 teaching year in a public school.
“I have to sit in front of a boy who fills the seat like an absurd grizzly bear pawing my pink backpack when I’m sharpening my pencil and hope you, the teacher, can help me.”
“I have to send my child to the public schools filled with preying children wearing long sleeves in the heat to hide visible bruises and to salve the pain in each breath they draw. My inability to afford private schools forces me to believe in the arithmetic of adults in charge.”
“I have to go to school through the dense mist of shattered plates scattered across the kitchen floor and screeches of distorted despair and with my heart’s weight want to fit in, escape the feeling of being the minstrel dressed in drag, hideous and innocent as a monster in a dream.”
“I see you staring at the red rosette of a hickey on my neck as your eyes avoid the mottled acne across my face, wishing I would embrace the grey light of compliance. I scavenge these days, avoiding you, the teacher, and your foreboding life as I trace with finger tips the cuts along the inside of my arms. My scribbles roar into the void of circling adverbial phrases, searching for rapture.”
“I refuse this bastardization of opportunity, the atrocity of you, the teacher, telling us how to climb the carcass of polite society and seek out the luminous future.”
“An opportunist, I have devoured your assumptions. This note is a precursor to a future which helps my elders surrender to the lie of their competence.”