down by the schoolyard

among the many things I am thankful for

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:37:42 -0500

having my cousin Grace ask where I am every thirty minutes and express a constant desire to (bake cookies/play board games/go see my room/play with the dog) with me
a father with a working knowledge of most major Chinese-American actors working today
a family with both the will and the capacity to cook two different turkeys in two different ways (roasted and fried)
a puppy wuppy
uninterrupted time to work on my thesis (with the exception of #1)
a thesis I like
a school I like
friends who still love me even when I fall off the face of the earth

sweet dumplings and pickled vegetables

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:14:19 -0400

I just wanted to memorialize these, one of the most delicious things I had on my trip to China, because there’s no way I’ll be able to remember the actual name of the dish.

also here.

too brief to blog

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:31:35 -0400

I am currently calling distribution companies in America on behalf of a TV network here, one of our contractors, so that we can figure out how to legally obtain and broadcast “Super Size Me” on the network as part of our obesity and nutrition campaign. “The Parliament passed a law,” their representative told me, rolling her eyes. “So now we can no longer show things without the license.” What were they doing before? Did they just buy a pirate copy from some guy on the street?

oh, this is adorable

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:12:53 -0400

Phil Campbell from Idaho and I head into Scarlet’s Restaurant in Russellville, just a few hours north of the town of Phil Campbell, Alabama. By tomorrow, twenty-two Phil Campbells—and one Phyllis Campbell—from all over the country will converge on Phil Campbell for the First Annual Phil Campbell Convention, organized by me, Phil. Campbell. In just thirty minutes, however, Idaho Phil and I have to meet the mayor of Phil Campbell to make the final preparations. We decided it would be important to have breakfast first.

Welcome to Phil Campbell.

ladies, can I get a witness?

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 10:46:00 -0400

TOO SMART TO LOVE

I’m pretty sure Funny or Die had a video on this theme also. Anyone?

home state 1, world 0

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 10:25:42 -0400

The 4.7 million barrels of aging bourbon even outnumbers the state’s population of 4.3 million.

Welcome to my college. Also, did you read the part where they described Kentucky as “magical”?

if only

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:59:37 -0400

“Emoticons we need in these troubled times.”

"I Will Forever Remain Faithful," by David Ramsey

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 10:03:53 -0400

There is just no excuse for me not having reproduced this in full. I have never read a better description of teaching, and I suspect I never will.

Complex magazine: What do you listen to these days?

Lil Wayne: Me! All day, all me.

2. Like a white person, with blue veins

In my first few weeks teaching in New Orleans’ Recovery School District, these were the questions I heard the most from my students:

1) “I gotta use it.” (This one might sound like a statement, but it’s a request—May I use the bathroom?)

2) “You got an ol’ lady?” (the penultimate vowel stretched, lasciviously, as far as it’ll go).

3) “Where you from?”

4) “You listen to that Weezy?”

I knew that third question was coming. Like many RSD teachers, I was new, and white, and from out of town.It was the fourth question, however, that seemed to interest my students the most. Dwayne Carter, aka Lil Wayne, aka Weezy F. Baby, was in the midst of becoming the year’s biggest rapper, and among the black teenagers that made up my student population, fandom had reached a near-Beatlemania pitch. More than ninety percent of my students cited Lil Wayne on the “Favorite Music” question on the survey I gave them; about half of them repeated the answer on “Favorite Things to Do.”

For some of my students, the questions Where are you from? and Do you listen to Lil Wayne? were close to interchangeable. Their shared currency—as much as neighborhoods or food or slang or trauma—was the stoned musings of Weezy F. Baby.

The answer was, sometimes, yes, I did listen to Lil Wayne. Despite his ubiquitous success, my students were shocked.

“Do you have the mix tapes?” asked Michael, a sixteen-year-old ninth grader. “It’s all about the mix tapes.”

The following day, he had a stack of CDs for me. Version this, volume that, or no label at all.

And that’s just about all I listened to for the rest of the year.

3. My picture should be in the dictionary
next to the definition of definition

Lil Wayne slurs, hollers, sings, sighs, bellows, whines, croons, wheezes, coughs, stutters, shouts. He reminds me, in different moments, of two dozen other rappers. In a genre that often demands keeping it real via being repetitive, Lil Wayne is a chameleon, rapping in different octaves, paces, and inflections. Sometimes he sounds like a bluesman, sometimes he sounds like a Muppet baby.

Lil Wayne does his share of gangsta posturing, but half the time he starts chuckling before he gets through a line. He’s a ham. He is heavy on pretense, and thank God. Like Dylan, theatricality trumps authenticity.

And yet—even as he tries on a new style for every other song, it is always unmistakably him. I think of Elvis’s famous boast, “I don’t sound like nobody.” I imagine Wayne would flip it: “Don’t nobody sound like me.”

Every few weeks, Michael or another student—for this piece, the names of my students have been changed—would have a new burned CD that was supposedly Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne’s long-anticipated sixth studio album. “This one’s official,” they would say. I learned to be skeptical even as I enjoyed the new tracks. Nothing “official” would come around until school was out for summer, but Lil Wayne created hundreds of new songs in 2007 and the first half of 2008. Vibe magazine took the time to rank his best seventy-seven songs of 2007, and that was not a comprehensive list. These songs would end up on the Internet, which downloaders could snag for free. He also appeared for guest verses on dozens of other rappers’ tracks. He thusly managed to rate as the “Hottest MC in the Game” (according to MTV) and the “Best MC” (according to Rolling Stone), despite offering nothing new at the record store.

While Wayne claimed to do every song “at the same ability or hype,” the quality varied widely. He wrote nothing down (he was simply too stoned, he explained), rapping off the top of his head every time the spirit moved him, which was pretty much all the time. The results were sometimes tremendous and sometimes awkward, but that was half the fun. His oeuvre ended up being a sort of unedited reality show of his wily subconscious.

5. Ain’t ’bout to pick today to start running

During the first few days of school, Darius, one of my homeroom students, kept getting in trouble for leaving classes without permission. At the end of the second day, he pulled me aside to tell me why he kept having to use the bathroom: he had been shot in the leg three times and had a colostomy bag.

When I visited him in the hospital a few weeks later—he was there for follow-up surgery—he told me about the dealers who shot him. Darius’s speaking voice is a dead ringer for Lil Wayne’s old-man rasp. “I told them, Do what you need to do, you heard me? I ain’t scared, you heard me?”

Then he leaned over and pointed, laughing, to Sponge Bob on the television.

Lil Wayne, rumor has it, briefly went to the pre-Katrina version of our school. Same name and location, but back then it was a neighborhood high school. The building was wrecked in the storm. Our school, a charter school, is housed in modulars (my students hate this euphemism—they’re trailers) in the lot in back. Sometimes I went and peeked in the windows of the old building, and it looked to me like no one had cleaned or gutted it since the storm. It was like a museum set piece. There was still a poster up announcing an open house, coming September 2005.

I taught fifth-grade social studies, eighth-grade writing, ninth-grade social studies. Sometimes I felt inspired, sometimes deflated.

One time, a black student vehemently defended his one Arab classmate during a discussion about the Jena 6: “If you call him a terrorist, that’s like what a cop thinks about us.” Another day, when I was introducing new material about Africa, a student interrupted me—“I heard them niggas have AIDS!”

8. Pain, since I’ve lost you—I’m lost too

Our students are afraid of rain. A heavy morning shower can cut attendance in half. I once had a student write an essay about her experience in the Superdome. She wrote, without explanation, that she lost her memory when she lost her grandmother in the storm. I was supposed to correct the grammar, so that she would be prepared for state testing in the spring.

9. Keep your mouth closed and let your eyes listen

Lil Wayne is five-foot-six and wiry, sleepy-eyed, covered in tattoos, including teardrops under his eyes. His two camera poses are a cool tilt of the head and a sneer. He means to look sinister, I think, but there is something actually huggable about him. He looks like he could be one of my students—and some of my students like to think they look like him.

The other day, I saw Cornel West on television say that Lil Wayne’s physical body bears witness to tragedy. I don’t even know what that means, but I do think that Wayne’s artistic persona is a testament to damage.

10.

One of my favorite Lil Wayne hooks is the chorus on a Playaz Circle song called “Duffle Bag Boy.” In the past year, he started singing more, and this was his best turn. He sounds a little like the neighborhood drunk at first as he warbles his way up and down the tune, but his singing voice has an organically exultant quality that seems to carry him to emotional delirium. After a while, he’s belting out instructions to a drug courier with the breathy urgency of a Baptist hymn. By the end of the song, the standard-order macho boast, “I ain’t never ran from a nigga and I damn sure ain’t ’bout to pick today to start running,” has been turned by Lil Wayne into a plea, a soul lament.

11.

On New Orleans radio, it seems like nearly every song features Lil Wayne. My kids sang his songs in class, in the hallways, before school, after school. I had a student who would rap a Lil Wayne line if he didn’t know the answer to a question.

An eighth grader wrote his Persuasive Essay on the topic “Lil Wayne is the best rapper alive.” Main ideas for three body paragraphs: Wayne has the most tracks and most hits, best metaphors and similes, competition is fake.

12. My flow is art, unique—my flow can part a sea

Once I witnessed a group of students huddled around a speaker listening to Lil Wayne. They had heard these songs before, but were nonetheless gushing and guffawing over nearly every line. One of them, bored and quiet in my classroom, was enthusiastically, if vaguely, parsing each lyric for his classmates: “You hear that? Cleaner than a virgin in detergent. Think on that.”

Pulling out the go-to insult of high schoolers everywhere, a girl nearby questioned their sexuality. “Y’all be in to Lil Wayne so much you sound like girls,” she said.

They just kept listening. Then one of the boys was simply overtaken by a lyrical turn. He stood up, threw up his hands, and began hollering. “I don’t care!” he shouted. “No homo, no homo, but that boy is cute!”

13.

Lil Wayne on making it: “When you’re really rich, then asparagus is yummy.”

Lil Wayne on safe sex: “Better wear a latex, cause you don’t want that late text, that ‘I think I’m late’ text.”

Lil Wayne on possibly less safe sex: “How come there is two women, but ain’t no two Waynes?”

14.

Okay, but it’s not any one line, it’s that voice. Just the way he says “car in park” in his cameo on Mario’s “Crying Out for Me” remix; it’s a soft growl from another planet. It sounds like a threat and a comfort and a come-on all at once.

15. I am just a Martian, ain’t nobody else on this planet

Right before you become a teacher, you are told by all manner of folks that it will be 1) the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and 2) the best thing you’ve ever done. That seems like a recipe for recruiting wannabe martyrs. In any case, high stakes can blind you to the best moments. One day, I was stressing over what I imagined was my one-man quest to keep Darius in school and out of jail, and missed that a heated dispute between two fifth graders was escalating. Finally, I asked them what was wrong.

“Mr. Ramsey,” one of the boys pleaded, “will you please tell him that if you go into space for a year and come back to Earth that all your family will be dead because time moves slower in space?”

16. And to the kids: drugs kill. I’m acknowledging that.
But when I’m on the drugs, I don’t have a problem with that.

On one of his best songs, the super-catchy “I Feel Like Dying,” Lil Wayne barely exists. He always sounds high, but on this song he sounds as though he has already passed out.

A lot of the alarmism about pop music sending the wrong message to impressionable youth seems mostly overwrought to me, but I’ll cop to feeling taken aback at ten-year-olds singing, “Only once the drugs are done, do I feel like dying, I feel like dying.”

First time I heard a fifth grader singing this in falsetto, I said: “What did you say?”

He said: “Mr. Ramsey, you know you be listening to that song. Why you tripping?”

My students always ask me why I’m tripping at precisely the moments when the answer seems incredibly obvious to me.

17.

After Michael cussed out our vice principal, I did a home visit. Michael was one of the biggest drug dealers in his neighborhood, and also one of my best students.

His mother was roused from bed. She looked half-gone, dazed. Then she started crying, and hugged me, pulled my head into her body. “No one’s ever cared like this,” she said. “Bless you. Thank you.”

Michael smiled shyly. “I just want to get in my right grade,” he told me.

“We’ll find a way to make that happen,” I told him.

A few weeks later, I gave him a copy of a New Yorker piece on Lil Wayne.

“Actually, that was good,” he said, later. “You teach me to write like that?”

18. Born in New Orleans, raised in New Orleans…

You live here as a newcomer and locals are fond of saying “this is New Orleans” or “welcome to New Orleans” by way of explanation. They use it to explain absurdity, inefficiency, arbitrary disaster, and transcendent fun. Enormous holes in the middle of major streets, say, or a drunken man dressed as an insect in line behind you at the convenience store.

Our challenge in the schools is to try to reform a broken system (the “recovery” in Recovery School District doesn’t refer to the storm—the district was created before Katrina, when the state took over the city’s failing schools) amidst a beautiful culture that is sometimes committed to cutting folks a little slack.

I have heard the following things speciously defended or excused by New Orleans culture: truancy, low test scores, drug and alcohol addiction, extended families showing up within the hour to settle minor school-boy scuffles, inept bureaucracy, lazy teachers, students showing up hungover the day after Mother’s Day….

19.

Once, a girl’s older sister looked askance at one of my best students after school, and about five minutes later there was a full-on brawl in the parking lot. I lost my grip on the student I was holding back and she jumped on top of another student’s mother and started pounding.

On the pavement in front of me was a weave and a little bit of blood. One of my ninth graders was watching the chaos gleefully while I tried to figure out how to make myself useful. He was as happy as I’ve ever seen him. He shrugged beatifically. “This is New Orleans!” he shouted, to me, to himself, to anyone who might be listening.

20.

Sometimes my students tell me they are sick of talking about the storm. Sometimes it’s all they want to talk about. Might be the same student. Some students have told me it ruined their lives, some students have told me it saved their lives. Again, sometimes the same student will say both.

21.

From an interview in early 2006:

AllHipHop.com: On the album, did you ever contemplate doing a whole track dedicated to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy?

Lil Wayne: No, because I’m from New Orleans, brother. Our main focus is to move ahead and move on. You guys are not from New Orleans and keep throwing it in our face, like, ‘Well, how do you feel about Hurricane Katrina?’ I f—king feel f—ked up. I have no f—king city or home to go to. My mother has no home, her people have no home, and their people have no home. Every f—king body has no home. So do I want to dedicate something to Hurricane Katrina? Yeah, tell that b—h to suck my d—k. That is my dedication.

22. I am the beast! Feed me rappers or feed me beats.

Lil Wayne mentions Katrina in his songs from time to time. He has a track that rails against Bush for his response to the storm. But, to his credit, he doesn’t wallow in his city’s famous tragedy.

The world needs to be told, and reminded, of what happened here. But New Orleans is bigger and more spirited than the storm. So its favorite son can be forgiven for refusing to let it define him. For my students, Lil Wayne is good times and good memories, and enduring hometown pride. All they ask of him is to keep making rhymes, as triumphant and strange as the city itself.

23. Ever since I was little, I lived life numb

Michael stopped coming to school. His mother told me, “He’s a man now. There’s nothing more I can do.”

Darius got kicked out for physically attacking a teacher.

I have lots of happy stories, so I don’t mean to dwell on these two, but I guess that’s just what teachers do in the summer months, replay the ones that got away.

24.

I read over this, and I got it all wrong. I fetishize disaster. I live in the best city in the world and all I can write about is hurricanes and dropouts.

25.

One time, after they finished a big test I gave them last period, my students started happily singing Lil Wayne’s “La La La” on their way outside.

“Come on, Ramsey, sing along, you know it.”

And so I did. “Born in New Orleans, raised in New Orleans, I will forever remain faithful New Orleans….”

That I wasn’t from New Orleans didn’t much matter, so long as I was game to clap and dance and sing. It was a clear and sunny day, Lil Wayne was the greatest rapper alive, and school was out. It was time to have fun.

I listened to Ben Harper on repeat all the way through Virginia....

Mon, 16 May 2011 21:01:04 -0400

I listened to Ben Harper on repeat all the way through Virginia. I guess I’m secretly nineteen.

things I have done since being home

Mon, 16 May 2011 20:56:33 -0400

painted nails
tried to get medical clearance (failed)
tried to change address (failed)
changed address for: bank, McSweeneys subscription
listened to 2.5 episodes of Pimsleur’s “Essential Russian I”
transferred belongings from car (pile) to room (pile)

Sakura Park

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 14:35:31 -0400

by Rachel Wetzsteon

The park admits the wind,

the petals lift and scatter

like versions of myself I was on the verge

of becoming; and ten years on

and ten blocks down I still can’t tell

whether this dispersal resembles

a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.

But the petals scatter faster,

seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor,

and at least I’ve got by pumping heart

some rules of conduct: refuse to choose

between turning pages and turning heads

though the stubborn dine alone. Get over

“getting over”: dark clouds don’t fade

but drift with ever deeper colors.

Give up on rooted happiness

(the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve

(a poor park but my own) will follow.

There is still a chance the empty gazebo

will draw crowds from the greater world.

And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:

the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.

"I want to see dogs wearing crisp uniforms on the first day of school, dogs sitting at little dog..."

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:31:06 -0400

“I want to see dogs wearing crisp uniforms on the first day of school, dogs sitting at little dog desks, dogs gluing together paper pilgrim hats, dogs practicing math problems on educational software or, for a more old-timey feel, sitting in a one-room schoolhouse and writing letters on black slates. I want to see dogs packing Conestoga wagons and setting out west, dogs homesteading, dogs committing atrocities, dogs realizing that atrocities have been committed and taking precautions to ensure that the same atrocities are not committed again. Dogs drafting the Magna Carta. Dogs developing a new, more advanced optical disk storage media format.”

- McSweeneys takes both dogs playing poker and internet memes to their logical extreme.

yet one must fill the yawning chasm

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:48:33 -0400

Sure, the issue includes plenty of stuff that does credit neither to poetry nor to readers of O — there’s a bunch of talk about using poetry to overcome personal challenges (if it worked as self-help, you’d see more poets driving BMWs)…and roughly a fifth of the coverage is devoted to Mary Oliver, about whose poetry one can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it.

Oprah Magazine’s Adventures in Poetry (via the as-of-now free NYTimes)

A more lucid attempt at delineating the role poetry has (or doesn’t) in modern American life, I have not yet seen. Also: OH SNAP, MARY OLIVER.

(PS: did I really beat Annie and Rachel to this?)

It’s Booooooooof. With nine os. (credit to my roommate...

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:27:04 -0400

It’s Booooooooof. With nine os.

(credit to my roommate Joe, who first introduced me to Stefon)

At my last school, the moms used to come in with these...

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:20:38 -0400

At my last school, the moms used to come in with these ridiculously fierce talons. We’re talking at least an inch or two off the finger, adorned with rhinestones, airbrushed with their children’s names or pictures of Barack Obama or whatever. I have to admit that I didn’t quite get the appeal. I didn’t see how anyone could fry an egg with fingernails like that, much less raise one or two or five of our children, most of whom were continually tugging on adult hands when they weren’t punching each other.

But now. It’s spring break and I went with my friend Jill to get my nails did and LOOK AT THAT. I think it started with that Hairpin post. But whatever it was, I spent an hour tonight perusing the fine offerings over at FYNA instead of researching malaria or Kenya or whatever it is I’m supposed to be spending my break reading about. I’m particularly fond of the fabric patterns and the paint spatters, and wherever you are, Morgan Wells’ momma, I’m sorry. I understand now. And believe you me, this is only the beginning.

earrings: hand-crocheted from embroidery floss. (by HillarE)

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:31:59 -0400

earrings: hand-crocheted from embroidery floss. (by HillarE)

Kobi Levi

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:49:48 -0400

shoes: do I want you? or am I scared of you?

from McSweeney's: What Your Favorite Classic Rock Band Says About You.

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:27:46 -0500

“Pink Floyd: Your garage is full of failed versions of your stereo/barbecue hybrid.”

next I'll be buying a set of Christian Riese Lassen notebooks

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 17:11:09 -0500

I don’t think I’ve seen a gallery of nail designs and thought “WANT” since I was ten years old. Thanks a lot, Hairpin.

three poems

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:08:24 -0500

Slate just ran a feature in which their writers selected some of their favorite love poems. I suppose it’s Valentine’s Day*, so here are three of mine. If you’ve ever read any of my other blogs, you’ve probably seen these before, but that’s okay.

*it is, I just checked

This Room and Everything In It

Li-Young Lee

Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.

I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.

I’ll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.

The sun on the face
of the wall
is God, the face
I can’t see, my soul,

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I’ve forgotten my
idea. The book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind…
the even-numbered pages are
the past, the odd-
numbered pages, the future.
The sun is
God, your body is milk…

useless, useless…
your cries are song, my body’s not me…
no good … my idea
has evaporated…your hair is time, your thighs are song…
it had something to do
with death…it had something
to do with love.

Before // Mark Halliday

Before you were you,
before your bicycle appeared under the street-lamp,
before you met me at the airport in a corduroy jacket,

before you agreed to hold my five ballpoint pens
while i ran to play touch football,
before your wet hair nearly touched the piano keys

and in advance of how your raincoat was tightly cinched
when you asked about nonviolent anti-war activity
and before you said “Truffaut,”

before your voice supernaturally soft sang
“I aweary wait upon the shore,”
before you suddenly stroked my thigh in the old Volvo,

when you had not yet said “Marcus Aureliius at 11:15”
and before your white shirt on the train,
before Pachelbel and “My Creole Belle”

and before your lips were so cool under that street-lamp
and before Buddy Holly in Vermont on the sofa
and Yeats in the library lounge,

prior to your denim cutoffs on the porch,
prior to my notes and your notes
and before your name became a pulsing star,

before all this

ah safer and smoother and smaller was my heart.

Slow Dance | Tim Seibles

Some days I can go nearly an hour
without thinking of the taste
of your mouth. Right now, I’m at school
watching teenagers fidget through a test.
Outside, the sky is smoky and streets are wet
and two grackles step lightly in yellow grass.

Two weeks ago in Atlantic City
I stood on the boardwalk
and looked out across the water -
the railing was cool, broken shells
dappled the beach – I had been
playing the slot machines
and lost all but a dollar. I
tried to picture you in Paris,
learning the sound of your new country
where, at that moment, it was already night.

I thought maybe you’d be out
walking with the street lights
glossing your lips, with your eyes
deep as this field of water.
Maybe someone was looking at you
as you paused under the awning
of a bakery where the smell
of newly risen bread buttered the air.

I remember those suede boots
you wore to the party last December,
your clipped hair, your long arms
like the necks of swans. I remember
how seeing the shape of your mouth
that first time, I kept staring
until my blood turned to rain.

Some things take root
in the brain and just don’t
let go. We went to
a movie once – I think
it was “The Dead” – and
near the end a woman
told a story about a boy
who used to sing: how, at 17,
she loved him, how that
same year he died. She
remembered late one night
looking out to the garden
and he was there calling her
with only the slow sound
in his eyes.

Missing someone is like hearing
a name sung quietly from somewhere
behind you. Even after you know
no one is there, you keep looking back
until on a silver afternoon like this
you find yourself breathing just enough
to make a small dent in the air.

Just now a student, an ivory-colored girl
whose nose crinkles when she laughs, asked me
if she could “go to the bathroom,”
and suddenly I knew I was old enough
to never ask that question again.

When I look back across my life,
I always see the schoolyard -
monkey-bars, gray asphalt, and one huge tree -
where I played the summer days into rags.
I didn’t love anybody yet, except maybe
my parents who I loved mainly when they
left me alone. I used to have wet dreams
about a girl named Diane. She was a little
older than me. I wanted to kiss her so bad
that just walking past her house
I would trip over nothing but the chance
that she’d be on the porch. Sometimes
she’d wear these cut-off jeans, and
a scar shaped like an acorn shone
above her knee. In some dreams I would
barely touch it, then explode. Once

in real life, at a party on Sharpnack Street
I asked her to dance a slow one with me.
The Delfonics were singing I’ll never
hear the bells and, scared nearly blind,
I pulled her into the sleepy rhythm
where my body tried to explain.
But half-a-minute deep into the song
she broke my nervous grip and walked away -
she could tell I didn’t know
what to do with my feet. I wonder
where she is now, and all those people
who saw me standing there
with the music filling my hands.

Woman, I miss you, and some afternoons
it’s all right. I think of that lemon drink
you used to make and the stories -
about your grandmother, about the bees
that covered your house in Africa, the nights
of gunfire, and the massing of giant frogs
in the rain. I think about the first time
I put my arm around your shoulder. I think
of couscous and white tuna, that one lamp
blinking on and off by itself, and those plums
that would brood for days on the kitchen counter.

I remember holding you against the sink,
with the sun soaking the window, the soft call
of your hips, and the intricate flickers
of thought chiming your eyes. Your mouth,
like a Saturday. I remember your
long thighs, how they
opened on the sofa, and the pulse
of your cry when you came, and
sometimes I miss you
the way someone drowning
remembers the air.

I think about these students
in class this afternoon, itching
through this hour, their bodies new
to puberty, their brains streaked
with grammar – probably none of them
in love, how they listen to my voice
and believe my steady, adult face,
how they wish the school day would
hurry past, so they could start
spending their free time again, how
none of them really understands
what the clock is always teaching
about the way things disappear.