A Teacher Lives in There

1. Fledgling
2. America: Democracy
3. Spring Rain
4. One Man
5. Love Notes
6. Cross-Curricular
7. untitled
8. Renewal
9. Haircut
10. Paper Cranes
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Spoiler

Note how optimistic I'm being by putting all thirty spots in ahead of time.

I approve of this highly. <33 XD

Fledgling

Young bodies snake through the gymnasium
in a musicless conga--
_______loud
_____________laughing
_____________________joyful.
Teenagers with their lanky grace,
fourth-graders tumbling after them
like a litter of puppies:
_______a tangled mass of youth
_______winging through a clear blue sky.

They are fledglings learning to fly,
soaring into adulthood--
_______their wings
______________not yet clipped
_____________________by the cares of the world.

I feel like a flightless old hen.

America: Democracy

An oak tree grew up overnight,
spread a canopy that drew starlings,
sparrows, doves, grackles. Robins and warblers
trilled in the branches,
singing songs of eggs and nests and life.

Then dissent,
or, perhaps,
dissent had festered all along, hidden
in the skirt of greenery and song.
Wood rot, leaf mold, wilt,
tattered leaves and brittle branches.

The tree creaks and groans like an old ship.
The roots support the leaves and
the leaves support the roots,
but roots are cut away as if they are nothing
and beetles burrow into barky grooves.
Leaves curl in on themselves and die.
New buds wither before they can form.

The tree murmurs, whispers.
The roots push through the soil,
trembling with the weight of the trunk--
they are the trunk;
they are the tree.

What difference does one root,
_______one branch,
______________one leaf
_____________________make?

Water, sunlight coursing through its veins
the tree sighs. Now and then,
among the crackling, hoary branches,
a glimpse of green:

a new shoot,
springy and tender and smelling of hope.

Spring Rain

The first spring rain
______releases remembering the way
____________it releases
the scent of soil, the
______black-barked trees, the moss,
____________my soul
from the grip of winter.

One Man

A solitary section of split-rail fence
squatted in the middle of a path
that was not a path,
which ran up a tussocky hillside
to a single, spreading oak.

The rails were splintered and old,
wet from the morning's rains.
Nearby, the scent of flowers
not yet blooming. Sneakers had beaten
a track around the posts,

up the hill
along the path that was not a path.
The fence standing, stretching,
unable to keep people in or out
but trying.

Love Notes

Dear Sir

______Love letters bound up in
____________long walks on the bike path,
______stride matching stride,

________________________and in
______bird calls: I teach, you learn
____________cardinals following us in the branches
______and blue jays you always spot before me.

______Love letters whispered and laughed
____________on our dirt-stained elbows and knees
______in the fresh spring soil and grass

________________________you tell me
______you want to tour all the waterfalls
____________in the state, learn to paint, and
______eat tomatoes from your own garden.

______Love letters bound up in
____________texts--who would've thought--
______but I ask you out, Dear Sir,

______and you reply, Delighted,
____________Dear Madam: the form
______our love notes take.

______Still, I can't tell you the ocean I feel
____________when the pavement ends and
______you drive away.

Cross-Curricular

The words in books reach back
through history, life connected by
a thousand invisible strings
to other lives

the way strands of DNA connect us
by evolution, history,
four proteins
to all other organisms.

Arborvitae aligned on the garden path
like mathematical certainties.
The stars as numerous
as sands in the ocean,

a multitude of drops. The great beast,
a biome in itself.
Heavenly bodies trace a universal equation
across the sky, the ecliptic's eternal circle.

All things flow together like a river.
We cannot tug on one thing without
finding it bound by a thousand invisible strings,
like adenine to thyamine,

like guanine to cytosine,
like tendons connecting muscle
to bone,
to everything in the universe.

Spoiler

Written using #napoverse prompt 3. Only took me a million years to actually get around to rearranging some of my old lines. There are so many I haven't even used yet.

A man doesn't fight to win.
That's why I'm here with you.

Tonight, it's quiet
like being in love
a mistake.

She sings like praying.
This is our story,
the glass shattered by a soprano.

I cried, it was so beautiful.

Renewal

Did a thunderstorm
____shake the world
________while I slept
__________or
____did I dream it?

Haircut

Hairspray permeates the air, faint
like rain in new grass,
hot water hissing, fingers drag through my hair,
tingling on scalp and neck as steam
rises from the basin, waterfalls
in the Amazon:
dark and tropical and vaguely mysterious.

Boys of Summer tinny on salon speakers,
muffled laughter from the back, where
my husband's blond hair warps to black.
In front, leather chairs creaking and
humming voices, hairdresser to customer
and back, but I always feel strange.
Rude:
prefer sitting quietly
while strangers play with my hair.

The rasp and snip of silver scissors,
still-damp strands of hair tickling my neck
and falling to the floor. Broom swishing by.
And I emerge from black vinyl,
a new woman.

Paper Cranes

The person gazing at you from
_____the wrong side of
dust-veiled books with missing covers
makes paper cranes out of napkin rings.

They smell like death lurking
_____around every corner:

_______one desolate body.