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Teaching

  • 3 days ago
  • 1 min read

By Ashley Kirkland

A bust of a man with a cape around his neck
Photo Credit: Sam Szuchan

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.


 

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