Porcupine Literary
A journal by and for teachers.
Photo courtesy of JJ Ying
Poetry
Listening
By Donald Seahill
The student takes his seat, passes
distracted fingers through the papers,
selecting this, no that, before he decides
against her and zippers the interview shut,
wanders off. Later she hears the workmen
on the neighbor’s stairs cough and laugh
and the bump bump bump of a big thing
transported. She surprises her cat. It
crouches in the past, puzzling out her
abstract face. Her children yawn over
panels colored in or paper still the color
of paper, their crayons going hush, hush.
Donald Seahill was born and raised in South Dakota and currently teaches writing at the University of California, Davis. He has published in the journal Science-Fiction Studies, and his piece on the Native American writer Zitkála-Šá appears in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Fiction. Just recently he discovered he is Shakespeare’s first cousin, twelve times removed, and in dark moments he really hangs on to that.