What my poetry students don’t know

By Matt Dube

Photo Credit: Derek Story

When I asked them how to shred

a carrot, one proposed tying it

to Mick Jagger’s guitar strings so that

his playing would shred it. They don’t know

Bobby’s Eddie Cheddar joke from King

of the Hill. See also the desire to make this

a list poem, or to dunk on my students.

They don’t know. Some of them

caught in the poetry trap. Listening

set them free. They write what they don’t

know on a grain of rice. What my poetry

students don’t know is the cold comfort

one can find in poetry. The light sting of

grounding for doing what you thought

was right. They’re lucky to know. My father

widowed, washed up in his hometown after

decades away, found the dirty gerund

poetry society on Sunday nights a refuge

for being who he was just then. Tied himself

to the mast like Odysseus and let it sing

to him. How certainty slipped away the more

he reached into it, a bottomless bag that remains

full after he emptied. There was more.

He’s the one who ran out. That’s what I want

my students to know.

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Matt Dube teaches creative writing and American lit at a small mid-Missouri university, and reads submissions for JackLeg Press. His poems have appeared in Pictura, Lenticular Lit, Last Stanza, and elsewhere.

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