Lady Macbeth Teaches Preschool
- Dec 29, 2025
- 1 min read
Updated: Jan 25
By Amy Wise Rothschild
She rolls the dry, crackled ball of blue-veined
play dough between her chapped palms—
smashes it.
Do not ask her if she is a kid or a mommy.
Do not call her mommy by mistake
when you wave a blonde cheese stick in the air.
She strikes its plastic peel like a match.
When the boys dangle naked babies by vinyl limbs,
dash the babies’ heads against wooden shelves,
she grips the boys’ wrists in her sinewed fingers.
Stop! She commands. These are the babies’ brains.
At the clinic she spells her last name over and over,
dons the bluegreen gown, unsexed, already.
She watches ovules bubble, broth in a cauldron.
Come like shadows, so depart.
She will slip back into khakis, back into Danskos,
hie to the classroom just in time to unclasp
children from their mother’s slacks.
They fall into her arms.
Lady Macbeth is surprised to discover
her body, too, is warm.
Note: “Come like shadows, so depart” belongs to the Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act IV.1.126.
Amy Wise Rothschild’s poetry appears in Tupelo Quarterly, ONE ART, Maudlin House, HOOT, and the Bellevue Literary Review, where she was the 2024 winner of the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She taught pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten for more than twelve years, mostly in Washington, DC. She now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
