The Teacher Who Preferred Judy Blume to Narnia

(If this two-legged train wreck had been one of my teachers, I probably would never have gone to college. She was a college classmate. The idea of her seeking employment as a teacher grossed me out...enough to goad me to write one of the few "poems" I wrote in college that I'm still willing to claim.)

This woman does not trust the mind

that could conceive a thing beyond

its sensory memories recombined:

she’d shelter children from the thought

of flying carpets, talking beasts;

she’d have their fantasies confined

to games, to holidays, to feasts;

mere repetition’s all they ought

to know of big mysterious words

like honor, courage, faith, and joy,

which they’ll repeat like trained, caged birds;

if they must read, let them be taught

stories of real, common things,

of driving to the shopping mall

and stealing brass and plastic rings

and hoping that a boy will call

and dreading friends who might betray

their staring long into a glass

and picking at their face all day,

but never high adventures where

the stakes are more than children’s play,

no gratitude for sacrifice,

no sacrifice for friendship’s sake,

nothing but muck beneath each pond:

how else should it be for such a one

who’s spent all her days in the silver chair

in the land that never saw the sun.