Poetry Greatness: Chandler Lohner and Lyle Paul

I asked my students to write a poem about a memory. The memory could be happy, sad, recent, ancient, whatever. The requirements included: 20 lines, intentional word choice that incorporated development, voice, and showed me what they were saying instead of just telling me. Here are some of the top poems!

Eyelashes
by Chandler Lohner

I never knew

How close one could get

to becoming nothing but skin and bones.

A deflated pile of

Wrinkled flesh and

Loose eyelashes that I

just wanted to yell at

For not flying far enough

Into the heavens.

For leaving the puddle of

tears that she cried

For dancing back to mock

me.

And the many wishes I had made.

Please.

Please just hold out your hand

And collect them in your palms, if you would.

I blew them right to you, so why do you keep on returning them

I don’t want them.

I want her.

And it’s okay

if she doesn’t have any eyelashes
left.

Why? by Lyle Paul

The sizzling of my brain must be a delightful sound for him

We’re gonna jump down turn around pick a bale of cotton

Cooking, crackling, breaking, liquefying, bubbling like a witch’s potion gone wrong

Jump down turn around pick a bale a day

Am I a slave to him or my mind?

Jump down turn around pick a bale of cotton

The drums produce a cadence to which I cannot walk

I’m gonna get on my knees and pick a bale of cotton

My ravaged soul jumps to reach the aspirations but the nine pound hammer keeps me down

Get on my knees and pick a bale a day

Peace is only present in the pulp

We’re gonna pick pick pick pick pick a bale of cotton

Am I really seeing the same sun, the same moon, the same stars that the others see?

Pick pick pick pick pick a bale a day

Jumping at the little scrap of rope he lets down the cliff

Me and my papy gonna pick a bale of cotton

All I receive is disappointment

Me and my papy gonna pick a bale a day

Why can’t you be better?

Pick a bale a day

I wish I had a better son

Pick a bale a day

Why are you even here?

Stomp a bunch of boll weevils

Are you serious?

Pick a bale of cotton

I do the best I can

Pick a bale of a day

I wish you had a better one too

Lordy oh Lordy!

I’m only here because I have to be

Pick a bale of cotton

Would it be better if I was not serious?

Pick a bale a day

Why am I here?

Pick a bale a day

I am a coward

Pick a bale a day

I watch the expectations soar like a doomed space ship

It soars to the heavens

It soars to death

It soars into the unknown

It soars to death

The text in RED is the slave song “Pick a bale of cotton. The texts in BLUE are the questions my father has regarding me. The texts in GREEN are the responses that I have for my father. This poem shows the beginning of the torment my father’s disappointment causes me and shows how I became a slave to his ideals and my own mind. It also slightly foreshadows what is to come.

Disappointment by Lyle Paul

The anger of my father did not hurt me

Heart pierced by the arrow disappointment

Sitting in the long long hall, watching his ideals fall hither

Belief I was something that I was not

Scum sitting at the bottom of life’s glass

O sweet Virgin Mary what can I do?

Internally crying, shrieking, and wailing

Clawing at the cage’s wall in desperation like an animal

A smile spreads from ear to ear

Falseness of reality served a release sweeter than death

Never to soar like the eagle

Never to inhabit the hallowed hall

Always to disappoint, always always always

Ahead to the left stood the man in white

Ahead to the right sat the woman in black

Hemlock creeped up the obelisk between the two

Sheer acceptance coursed through me

No longer did the band of leather cause pain

No longer did the loss of faith cause pain

No longer did my father’s disappointment cause pain

...right?? I'm telling you. I'm constantly impressed by the young adults I'm so privileged to work with every day.

A Memory Poem: Hannah George

The first of my recollections stored away for none to see:

Teetering tricycles

sidewalking dangerously close

to the break of the earth

I could see the sea

I could feel my name

pattering against the backs of my ears

but my eyes could only think in front of me

That day I met my most steadfast companion

when my ears first met my eyes

My heart shuddered

My eyes blinked themselves clear

The waves I had loved

wrestled me into the ocean

slowly enough to startle.

Now I needed light to sleep

my dreams were daylight

unplagued by the feeling of falling

because I cautiously tread.

Fear faithfully accompanied me

a seemingly omnipotent best friend.

She scratched a moral compass on the back of my wrist

with the north star pointing to my past

lighting my path into a familiar circle

In encountering Risk

fear gave me a pinch

and I turned away.

When meeting Change, I see Fright’s shadow

and am reminded of all she’s done for me.

As horizons change my loyalties fade

the sunsets reveal her other half

the lights of the night reveal the deceit in my partner’s face

true colors glow in the dark

when it seems no one is watching

deceit can always be seen.

I sleep in the dark now.

A Memory Poem: Jordan Candler

7
I think I’m prettier than the rest of the girls in my class. They're too skinny.
8
I'm quitting my school’s basketball team. I’m not good at basketball. The other girls are faster than me. They won't like me if I'm not as fast as them.
9
Today I got called fat for the first time.
His name is Daniel.
He's very good at PE.  His feet move fast and mine do not so he used his to trample all over me. I did not cry.
10
I do not like my new school. I do not have friends here.
11
I don’t understand why I am the only person who sits alone at lunch.
11
Why do you keep telling me I smell weird? I don’t like it when you say I am ugly. I don’t like it when you laugh at me. I do not like it when you tell me I am stupid.
11
Every time you told me I had no friends, you broke something. You broke my walls as if my shattered remains made your mirror reflect better. Your tongue threw more dodge-balls at me than the kids did in PE and I’m tired of being pelted with you’re a loser you’re a loser you’re a loser you’re a loser.
my hands curl around my vocal chords searching for my last “stop it” but all I feel is choked
11
My mind is a museum and I wish you would stop hanging up paintings I do not want to see
My heart is the fragile sculpture you have to search very hard to find and if you break it, you buy it so stop throwing around your rock hard words and shattering everything with a touch of beauty
You speak in explosions and everything I can see is ablaze
I’m trying to block the fire with my last shred of decency but its edges are curling in and now I can’t look people in the eyes when they talk to me because all I see is a spark above a flood of gasoline.
11
You use keys as weapons and computer screens for a mouth and pixels pry open every piece of pride I have left.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but combinations of letters typed online should not be able to make me feel worthless.
83
Percent of girls report being bullied either in school or online.
56
Percent of students have witnessed some type of bullying at school.
90
Percent of bullying happens in 4th through 8th graders.
24 out of 25
Teachers who witness bullying in their class do not report it and see it as trivial and as something that will pass.
160,000
Students skip school each day due to fear of bullies
9
The age a girl’s self esteem peaks
9
The age I was called fat for the first time
16
Stop building armies in your mouth.
Stop using your words as warfare and shooting me with four letter bullets.
Build castles with your tongue and let others stand upon them.
16
Spill your heart from your mouth.
Do not destroy what is beautiful. See more than what is ugly.
If you need rose colored glasses to see each person as a glass half full of “do not dehumanize me” so be it.
16
You are a vessel and the things inside of you are so much more important than your frame. 
Make others know that.
Make yourself know that.

Where our Realities Waited: A Student Piece

I just....I can't quite...um....

forget it. There's no intro I can type that'll adequately prepare you for the haunting intensity of this beautiful poem. Read it & literally weep (I did...). 

Where our realities waited

              Emma Jogerst

1.

you are everything all at once

and I can see a thousand 

                                        lullabies

in your eyes

I die every time you look at me

And the sky is weeping now

Every drop is a word I can’t say

And when it kisses me the

                                            fire

Blooms again and

if you were mine

I could be okay

2.

oh

but I’m not sure what I would do to

have you touch me;

Burning into my legs

Because I’ve been waiting for you

To come along and strip me of all that I am.

Perhaps its suicide,

Perhaps I’m drowning,

Perhaps It’s hard to walk barefoot into the water

When I’m already so cold

3.

baby, baby brother

my soul is too old

lets write a thousand thousand tomorrows

we could burn brighter

as the earth becomes dimmer still

and I would not shake when I see you

its 3 am; youre asleep and

it hurts to look at the moon

without you

4.

your sleepy eyes are my favorite poem

but I want you for everything

you see I’ve been flipping you

over about a billion times

in my head until you’re black and bruised

a piece of the sky

because I can’t touch you

I’m writing this and every verse makes me feel raw

Stinging like an epilogue

The door is shut, the windows closed

But I still feel your very soul

5.

you’re my summer sunrise

and my pillow feels warm

lets build a fire and burn

ourselves into ashes and smoke

and melt into the clouds where we belong

I would paint a new world for you

That wouldn’t hurt so much

6.

how can he just stand there

and be so beautiful

he bangs his head to

the beat of my pulse

I feel so much for him

I want to find him underneath

the evergreen

7.

I am awakened by the still air of morning

and I got 4 hours of sleep

the branches are outlined against the temperate sky

I’m pretty sure there’s a world between

every curve that your voice makes

and it’s hard to write when I’m drowning

and it’s hard to think about you with your blue sweater on

the birds are telling me things

you’re sighing life into the world

8.

I can hear your heart,

It is in sync with mine

And I want to kiss your lips

Until all I see is stars

And sunshine

I would melt into you

And I wouldn’t have to feel this

Heavy weight on my chest

Forever

Remind me that I am

More than I feel

9.

Saturn sized worlds

Where our realities waited

And we lived by the sea

And packed ourselves tightly together

But it’s hard to look my mother in the eyes now

It’s hard to see my God before me

The silence is enough

I don’t want to leave this place

Because that means leaving you

10.

raw and red from the rain

brown eyed in the quad

i need more time to

explore you and your world

and all that you hide

a silent prayer has built churches in me

they wait for me to find the

nerve to touch your face

with the lights on

our realities wait between

shivers and sighs

and

moondust and starshine

Gabi Smith on Slut Shaming

There are times when you come across writing that touches something deep inside of you. One of my favorite things in the entire world is when that writing happens to be a student's piece. It feels more real when it comes from one of the young adults who sits in my class. It feels more personal.

The assignment was to create a written work that was inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. My students were given 10 options in which to execute this assignment; they only had to choose one. The 10 options varied...they could write a eulogy for one of the characters, predict the future of another character, write poetry based on the themes found within the novel, etc. One of the more popular options was to create a story based on the concept of slut shaming. Essentially, that is what the main character of The Scarlet Letter went through (in an entirely puritan way, of course).  The purpose of this particular option was for the students to make connections to 21st century judgement and the judgment cast upon the people of Colonial America. Gabi did a fantastic job. Check it out...

Look Forward

            Look to your left.

            See a girl; see someone, and see no one. See collars that are pulled up too high on her chest for whoever's liking and see dresses that to her are proper and to anyone else are prude. See modesty mistaken for an excuse for misogyny and do not turn your eye when boys push her around, take her conservative lengths as challenges instead of choices. She is reprimanded for owning herself, for her decision to never owe anyone anything back, to never give neither sole nor her body. Half the people she knows rap gold medals so tightly around her neck for saving her virtue that she hangs herself with them every night after the other half taunt her for it. She is all t-shirts and disinterest with sex for how often it is thrown in her face. When people watch her it is not for her humanity; she is observed as a trophy, something to be broken and taken, a halo to smash in the name of God’s instructions. By social definition, she is a prude and therefor a subordinate and if her spine ever dares to straighten back up in an effort to look those in the eye who patronize her there will always be someone waiting to snap her back into submission because after all she is but a child yet to be whipped and bled and dragged screaming and kicking into womanhood. Her whole life is a mess of disappointment and commendations, going from being thrown down on a bed to having a chastity belt secured around her narrow waist by hands she never said could touch her to having the key thrown down a well that she can not see the bottom of and being told that one day when she finds the right boy he will find it for her but she knows that even then she still will not get it back at her asking only his wanting. People watch her and her high collars and wide eyes, and they see a fetish, a cherry popper hallmark and a conquest waiting to happen. Her neck is sore from being strangled; her wrists ache from being cuffed and pulled side to side, label to label, bad to no better, and if she could she would rip her own hands away and simply gift them to both sides. She would lend her heart to her mother and her lungs to the boy that used to take her breath away and her feet to every punter as a peace offering to say that she has decided to stop running and her shoulder blades to every person who has ever treated her to be some sort of angel for the of lack what she has let in between her legs so they would know she is just a girl, nothing more and nothing less, with no wings to be found. In her goodbye letter she will let them know that the ones they stole off a dead swan and taped to her back never really suited her anyways, that she took them off a long time ago and now she is just breathing through the fall. She hopes that in the end they learn that you cannot make someone a dove by feeding her less and tying her hands behind her back so she cannot have much of a choice. She will always have a choice; even when no one bothers to ask she will still grit her teeth, look everyone who has ever looked down on her in the eye, and she will say, “No.”         

            Look to your Right.           
           See a girl; see someone, and see no one. See low cut blouses and skirts that are too short and yet not short enough for everyone’s liking but her own; see crop tops and booty shorts and behold before you the modern virgin harlot. To all the people she does not owe an explanation to she is a warm body with a cold heart. When she talks of not wanting children she feels a vacuum in her lungs as seemingly every mother on the planet gasps in horror. The girl laughs when the ladies think they are being quiet enough in their remarks of how on the track she is going on, she will end up with them anyways. If she cared to explain herself, if she cared what they thought, she would dwell on all the things they do not see. They do not know that she has never widened her knees without thought, that every time she trades a part of herself to someone else she gets pieces back. She is not lacking; she is still whole. They do not know that the only time her thighs are not pressed side by side in an answer in and of itself, is as she saunters past viscous pairs of eyes not worth her looking back as they are too busy looking at her literal assets. Sometimes though, those eyes follow her along with hands and catcalls and things she never asked for. She is in a unceasing struggle of letting her femininity wander freely as it should be able to and trying to protect it from those who desire to brand their own name into it’s hide. Her nights are warped into a dangerous game of alertness and care over details that should never have to matter but do anyways because juries still ask questions she might need to answer. No matter how hard she tries people still will not let her body be her own, her life constantly a game of how much faster can someone get her on her back then the last one who had her. She loves herself and she is proud of her sexuality, of her seduction and confidence, but she is terrified because it feels as though she is being asked to give and give all the time but what she gets back is a mere gift, a token for pity like she is some sort of lost puppy who really only has one good use before she is thrown back onto the streets again. She fears for if one day someone tears her apart and she fears for if she ever lets him. If a boy pins her down in an alleyway and she cannot seem to make loud enough of a sound is she even real, was she ever even here if no one believes her? Perhaps, she is the demon that everyone pins her to be, fallen from the angel they called her before she decided her choices could be both out of spite and desire. When she takes the first step into a world girls are supposed to be carried into drugged and dragging their feet with clouded, unknowing consciousness, she opens up the doors to heaven and cracks open a worldly hell and she names herself princess of everything that has ever refused to do things anyway but their own. If anyone ever cared to really look, even with her crown they would know she is but a girl. She refuses to be a conquest or a notch in a totem pole from another century no matter how harshly she is shoved onto her knees. No matter who pushes her, she will always stand back up, push back, pull towards her, tear apart, bite and mark and hiss by her own consensus a, “Yes.”

Gabi Smith, everybody!!!!!! So proud of her and her immense abilities!

Nightmares & Introductions

For the past four years I've had a pretty consistent nightly routine in the weeks before school starts: I promise myself I'll start going to bed at a decent hour, make plans with friends, immediately break my 'early to bed' promise, stay up way too late, and then finally in the early morning hours of the next day, sleep.

And then the terror comes.

My back-to-school nightmares are pretty remarkable. Not in the sense that they make me feel like a fortune-telling gypsy, but in the sense that they are so vivid & so intense. People say they have strong imaginations, and I too have had my fair share of bizarre dreams....dreams that would never in a million years be possible because they involve Spongebob and I starting a food fight and then Patrick comes in screaming, saying I'm three weeks behind on the pizza orders and then my dream zooms out and I've taken the form of Gary. No wonder I'm behind on the pizza orders. I'm a snail. Waking up from dreams like that usually doesn't phase me...I laugh at how weird that was, take about 17 seconds to try & figure out what I was doing the day before that might have inspired such strangeness, and then go about starting my day. But the back-to-school nightmares are an entirely different beast.

In these nightmares, I'm at work. In my classroom, surrounded by eager, new, 11th grade students. Weird, right? I've never been shy about expressing really intense love for my job, so the fact that these nighttime horrors occur at a place I am so grateful to be seems backwards. But there I am. I'm teaching, sometimes from the front of the class, sometimes speaking one-on-one with a student, when all of the sudden I lose my mind. I fly off the handle. I scream. Throw things. Make kids cry, then laugh in their faces. I taunt them, I verbally abuse them, and in my dreams I swear to you..I feel nothing. It's as if the real me completely disappears and is replaced by a demon-woman who is hell bent on making every single day miserable for every single one of her students. I become cruel. An enraged shrew. And Dream Me loves it. She loves watching the confused flood of emotions overtake her students' faces. Humiliation and embarrassment are her favorites. She feeds off the weak and terrorizes the weaker. She's a monster.

It is not an exaggeration to tell you that I wake up from these dreams gasping for air, tears running down my cheeks. In those first seconds of being awake I experience a feeling of relief so tangible it's jarring. It isn't real, calm down. Breathe.

What blows my mind is that Dream Me could not be farther from Real Life Me. I have no idea why my mind goes there, every stinking year, especially since I have mad love for my students. I can honestly say I've never, ever been tempted to do anything to a student in real life that Dream Me has lavished upon her dream students. So where does it come from? How come, after four back-to-school August's, the nightmares not only reoccur, but gain intensity? Ugh.

On the bright side though, every year I meet my students and am incapable of adequately expressing how much I appreciate & admire them. In fact, it's almost like there's a connection between how terrible my dreams are and how awesome my kids are. (It isn't exactly a science, but I do have proof to support my theory.) Seriously though, I have crazy creative, intelligent, & hilarious kiddos. And every year, I am so blown away by what they are capable of and what they are willing to share with me & their classmates. It's unbelievable.

I created a brief survey that I asked my 185 students (yes, you read that right...185 students) to complete on the first day of school. Sidebar: it was the first year I did it electronically, which, let me tell you, was way more convenient for me than the old-school worksheet method. I was able to read each individual's response on a spreadsheet, and I just finished going through that spreadsheet about 30 minutes ago. These kids, man. I'm telling you. In addition to some very heart-felt and honest responses, some of my questions got wacky answers, which I found super entertaining. Here's a couple gems:

In response to the question, what do I need to know about you?
- I'm a very charismatic person. Charm to spare.
- I laugh at almost everything- it's highly inconvenient in many situations.
- I really wish I was ambidextrous
- I love Dance Moms
- I tolerate school
- I'm in band. That's it. That's all there is to know. Seriously.
- I am 95% chicken nugget

Needless to say, it looks like it'll be another rockin' year in room 111. This group is already showing me who they are, and willing to interact with one another. I can't wait to get to know them & teach 'em some literary greatness & show the importance of doing what you love. And the best part? I know they'll teach me a bunch of stuff too :).