By Carla M. Cherry
Instead of smiles,
snapping fingers,
rounds of “Miss, that was fire,”
stiff quiet
choked me like a cloud
of cigarette smoke
after my students
finished reading my poem.
What is up with the cliche
about crickets and silence?
What I would have traded
then for the music of
midnight chirping.
My heart a kettledrum,
I assured them I have
elephantine skin,
that they need not like
every text I set before them.
Nick:
Miss, you need to work on your poetry skills.
Why can’t we read Jay-Z? He’s a poet.
I promised we would.
On my way back from the restroom,
my friend
who teaches two doors down,
beckoned me to her class.
She waved at Anna,
who told her the poems
I have had them read--
Dylan Thomas,
Mahogany Browne,
mine--are too long.
My friend pointed at me, proclaimed
I am a prolific published poet.
Miss, don’t worry, Anna replied.
Your poem was good. Nick just wasn’t
smart enough to understand it.
“It’s cool,” I said,
but the pre-teen in me
wanted to repeat Anna’s insult,
laugh in Nick’s face
when I assigned the class
to write their own NYC poems,
and he showed me
eight lines of half-rhymes
about the subway
he insisted on reading aloud to us all.
It landed with the thud of a rock.
Pauses lingered in the air
before they assured Nick
his poem made them imagine being on the train.
But I sat before him,
nudging him to close his eyes,
tease out the names of trains he takes,
the colors of the subway seats,
movie ads tucked in frames above them,
the straphangers swaying
to the music in the chaos.
He promised to set it all to rhyme,
glint of light in his eyes.
Carla M. Cherry is a high school English teacher. Her work has appeared in Random Sample Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, 433, and Raising Mothers. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her five books of poetry, Gnat Feathers and Butterfly Wings, Thirty Dollars and a Bowl of Soup, Honeysuckle Me, These Pearls Are Real, and Stardust and Skin are available via iiPublishing. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Carla can be found on Instagram: @carlabxpoet1.
