From the Yaghan, a word that denotes a look two people share, both wanting to initiate
something, but neither of them starting.
The right words, my teacher explains
_____come after you’ve written
_________the wrong ones. Perhaps this is why
I have no name for the sunlight
_____that spills like orange juice
_________across the classroom floor
or for the strange prickle I feel
_____when Marie walks to the sharpener
__________to whittle her graphite to a point
she can make in this in-class writing
_____assignment, to tell a story
__________about what we want to be
when we are grown, after these years
_____of school. Then, my options
__________limited to super spy or mill worker,
my father or a version of him,
_____moving between the dark shadows
__________of a world of single wides on limestone
streets, where passwords and checkpoints
_____were Doral cigarettes and a tip-back
__________of the head that meant, “What’s up?”
Now, Marie has passed me again
_____but not dropped a note or hint
__________that she’s seen my long gazes
or felt my certainty that one day,
_____she will look back at this moment
__________and know it was now—here,
in this place of knowledge,
_____she found in me a glossary of escape.
__________Her father the foreman. My father
the drunk. We are meant to be.
_____Seventh grade swells like a pimple
__________until we all burst out, infected
with dreams and certainties,
_____until we can all sharpen our pencils
__________to write the futures teachers
think an Oxford outline defines.
_____I take up my own Number Two
__________Berol Mirado and hover above
the blue-lined paper, imagine
_____words appearing like heat on invisible
__________ink, the message that would appear,
the secret of escape from here.
_____Someone throws a wad of paper
__________and Marie is looking away, the guilt
I seek on torn edge of her paper.
_____The way she does not look at me
__________is a clear sign all this is meant to be.
