June 2023
- Jul 20
- 3 min read
By Ashley Elizabeth
I grabbed a bag of leftover chips from Teacher Appreciation Week after my principal summoned me to her office. My gradebook was done. I'd been emailing parents about students' grades, albeit unsuccessfully. After some friendly banter and me reminding her for the second time that day to drink water, the principal's tone shifts.
"June Ist is coming. We need to do something," she says, definitively. "I thought I'd ask you while I had you."
I echo my thoughts out loud, "June first? What's happening on June first? Graduation isn't until the ninth." I pop open the bag and slide a salty chip in my mouth one of the best before-lunch snacks. "We have the speaker already. Miss Mena will help with emceeing. We'll rehearse while sixth and seventh graders—"
"Not graduation," she interrupts, "but I was thinking I could invite his mom to that too. I just need to know what your plan is so I can share it with the staff."
Oh.
June Ist.
The salt in my mouth transmutes to the sand that covered his chest as he was wheeled up to the camp nurse's station on the back of a speeding golf cart. I finish chewing, swallow, and look down at my lap. I whisper his name, more to myself than to her. How could I forget? Athumani changed me, changed us. That year, our poetry portfolios were the best they'd ever been, students choosing to write about losing their classmate, their friend; it was the only thing they knew. The only thing I could model how to do. That year was the year I cried the most in the classroom. The year that I let my students see me cry, see that I was human and missing him
too. The year taken from us by a hard-swallowed grief.
After a few agonizing minutes of the principal staring at me, and me avoiding her gaze, I clear my throat. "A moment of silence would be nice. And everyone could wear purple and black. I think that's fitting. I can't think of much else. I'm sorry."
The glass-encased memorial with white candles and his last school picture bookended by wings by the front office where I sign in every day. The sign they hung at the entrance to the middle school side of campus. The vase of forever purple flowers by my desk, his smiling face floating among them. I see him, hear him, even where he isn't, even where it's impossible for him to be.
Thirteen is too young. We couldn't save him, and he shouldn't be dead.
Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer and teacher whose work has appeared in SWWIM, Voicemail Poems, Rigorous, and Sage Cigarettes, among others. Ashley's debut full-length collection, A Family Thing, is published by Redacted Books/ELJ Editions (August 2024). She is also the author of the chapbooks red line (Garden Party Collective, 2024), CHAM(ed) (fifth wheel press, 2024) black has every right to be angry (Alternating Current, 2023) and you were supposed to be a friend (Nightingale & Sparrow, 2020). As cofounder of the Estuary Collective, Ashley strives to provide free to low-cost programming for femme-identifying BIPOC. When Ashley isn't teaching, working as the Chapbook Editor with Sundress Publications, or coordinating workshops for fifth wheel press, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet). She lives on the original land of the Piscataway and Susquehannocks (Baltimore, MD) with her partner and their three cats - despite her not being a cat person. Ashley is Black before she is anything else.
