By Cassandra Whitaker
For Jen
The principal carries her smile in her hands
as if it were food. She feeds
everyone. But not everyone wants to be fed;
she smiles and calls each child
by name. So often children do not want
to be named because being named means someone
is watching and when someone is watching
there is often a choice. Do I hide? Do I
trust? How can one learn
if there is no trust? How does one
nourish? The principal’s name is Rayne.
Rain nourishes. Rain
destroys. The misery
of rain is in the need. The joy
of rain is in the wonder
of it, at just the right time,
at just the right moment.
School is in Session
By Cassandra Whitaker
Tractors carrying bread
for Norfolk shipyards roll by
like a complex sentence.
Twenty miles north, a sleepy security
detail transcribes phone calls, a lesson
on pronoun antecedent confusion.
In the Atlantic north of us,
a captain of a private fishing vessel
picks up refugees in exchange for cash.
He folds the money away
like a permission slip. His fortune
multiplies for the short term.
The refugees fortune diminishes
for the short term. In a small town
on the highway, wraiths skulk the dark
to meet the dope man; like adverbs
wraiths are in-between states. Energy
cannot be created or destroyed.
After Tiresias transformed back
into a man, he could see
beyond death. Death is a state
of being. State of being verbs
are passive. Avoid passive
verbs. Action, action, action.
Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a trans writer from Virginia whose work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Mississippi Review, Foglifter, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Evergreen Review, and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle and an educator.
