Teaching
- May 5
- 1 min read
Updated: 12 minutes ago
By Ashley Kirkland
It’s the lines about Caesar’s wounds
like mouths that speak to me every time
I teach it. Which is to say something like
If these wounds could talk, what
would they say? Call out the names of my
murderers, my friends? If my wounds could talk
they would say I bleed for each of you
and you and you. I almost cried on the phone
during a conference because the student
had a bad day and I feel it all like wounds
like mouths with tongues that speak to me
so clearly. To be sixteen is to be
a talking wound. Do you remember walking
around and loving the world so much it
hurt? I walk around now with the weight
of hundreds of teenagers on my
shoulders; my boulder is walking into
this building again every morning to
start over, to read again Act III in which
he dies again and again and again.
Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.
