The English teacher reads Neruda from a textbook,
explaining what he means as she goes.
Her tongue lays down the words like slabs.
Her voice doesn’t rise or fall
(except yesterday when
a mouse ran through the room
and everyone rose from their graves.
She stood on her desk, a dark priestess
phoning the office to order it’s death.)
The students harden in their chairs.
I wander through the room
checking for heartbeats.
I find the tiny body behind stacks
of Hemingway and Salinger,
its smallness already rotting
in a plastic trap.
in a plastic trap.
She misses the point,
assigns the vocabulary,
and heaps a shovel of dirt
over the poet.
Next period she will dig him halfway up.
