I tell them to sit down and they don’t.
I ask a question and the room explodes.
Today’s vocabulary word is Forever.
I ask what it means and yes,
I regret it immediately.
Twenty-four hands shoot up
like dandelions after rain.
There’s a boy crawling under his desk
and a girl using her braid as a lasso.
I swear I care, but they wear me down
like sidewalk chalk under a sprinkler.
“It’s how long math takes!”
“Until lunch.”
“Until I die.”
I write their responses until the chalk
cracks in my hand.
That was my last stick.
How long can a teacher last, I wonder,
before she snaps like a plastic ruler
from the back-to-school bin.
The girl with the lasso is now chewing her braid.
The boy under the desk is humming a song
that might be a threat.
Still. There’s one. Third row.
Hair thwarting her pigtails.
Not the kind you notice, unless you’ve learned
to scan the quiet ones for signs of combustion.
She’s got her arm up, straight as a fence post.
When I call on her, her voice is thin as beaten tin:
“Forever is when nobody forgets you.”
For a second, the whole room
shuts up.
Then the boy under the desk
starts wheezing like a harmonica.
I hand him his inhaler,
erase the chalkboard with my hand.
We move on to Perimeter.