School

By Stella Brice

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In third grade after lunch, Mrs. Joseph tells us to
alphabetize ourselves into a straight line.  We take
satisfaction in the knowledge of our 31 names—of all
the names, both the first one and the last.

Lunch boiling in our stomachs, we line up in the order
of the knowledge of these names.

We live the alphabet:  flesh made word.

On a scraped floor, Mrs. Joseph perfects us.  She
shuffles a body here to there.  She forms a kind of
library—each child bound and placed.

Now we march towards homeroom. We are mesmerized by
the back of the kid in front of us; mesmerized by the
swirling patterns of their hair.

Then we rest our heads on our desks and Mrs. Joseph
reads us a book about a girl who lives alone in the
forest; who grinds acorns for bread; who survives
winter; who has her fox; who has her owl; who has
her wounded dog for company.

We drink this book in the darkness of our triangles
of arms as the girl’s father searches for her entire
seasons in his airplane but we don’t want her to be
found.

We want her crawling down
difficult trails where there
is barely any light.

She takes another breath.

Her belly distending with cold water,
she crawls on the school of the ground.

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Stella Brice is the author of five books of poetry, including Urged and Wait ‘Til I Get Fatter (both by VAC/Purple Flag Press) and Creatures (INKira Press). She is a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee and a winner of the John Z. Bennet Prize. For several years, she served as a mentor and literary advisor for the PEN Prison Writing Program.

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