Higher Education

I’ve been funneled in and out of institutions like a lamb.

Carrying all my manners between my teeth, I jog uselessly to the board.

I chalk the date, the time, the material at hand.

We speak of Parataxis.

A faucet inside me breaks, won’t stop running.

I water everything: the long white desks, the softness of feet.

We speak of The syllabic—the nucleus of a syllable:

I’m leaky with regret.

We speak of sun, urns, the names Odysseus and Achilles

skip across my tongue: small, eloping pebbles.

I must believe in this room, in all it can offer me:

Riches, communion, flight, a turn towards the light.

And yet: I cannot buy it, this fraught net the teacher

draws with her lips: Repeat after me—

Education a barbed wire used to bend?

How many moments across time have we seen language

curl to cruelty? It begins with the word, the world—

Memory roams through a field of snow:

Repeat after me—A little red book,

spare bodies at the square—

and after?

The sun sinks,

a loose red pearl bobbing

in the white.