Pink skin split open/the weight of him heavy as stones. Bodies figure prominently in Limairy’s work.
She always sits in the last row, her back pressed against the wall, the only one not swiping at her phone. Flick, flick, flick. When I was their age, I would never dream of showing the professor I wasn’t paying attention.
“Miss Klopkin,” they say. “Why can’t we rhyme?” And “this is hard” and “what’s the point of close reading?” What is the point of diving below the surface to reveal a deeper meaning when it’s right there in front of us?
We review villanelles, sonnets, elegies, odes, and they mimic these archaic forms, filling them with stray nouns, dull as a city bus cruising the streets of suburbia after dark. Except Limairy. Her words creep into my brain like mice, and I repeat them while watching TV, driving to school, picking out grapefruit at ShopRite. It seems wrong to give her a grade, so I write good enjambment and nice alliteration and you should unpack this image a bit more in revision.
I turn off the classroom lights, let them listen to songs that sound like noise while they compose. They don’t seem to appreciate the effort much, except for Limairy, who smiles and writes more than the assignment requires, detailed prose poems. Crushed fur, legs rubbing legs, crushed baby doll / hey, daddy/ break me. I show that one to the Assistant Chair of the English Department because I need him to tell me what to do. It seems fairly obvious but I don’t have tenure. “Do nothing,” he says, “She’s an adult. She has a right to privacy. Artistic license. It’s not our place to interfere.”
But is Limairy’s father interfering with her? A Victorian word – interfering. A euphemism, a trap. I want to cut the trip wires, set her free. What can I do exactly? Call Social Services? I don’t even know where she lives. Invite her to stay on the pull-out couch in my small studio apartment? I don’t want anyone living with me. Then I recite her poems again in my head and feel sick. My helplessness is palpable, a frightened weasel that gnaws its own tail off trying to escape.
“Is what you’re writing true?” I finally ask Limairy one autumn afternoon when the leaves on the ginkgo trees have turned a sour yellow. She has sad, wolverine eyes and a tattoo on her right wrist that says Death to Saviors.
She crumples her latest poem into a small, white ball. She will never write another in my class, will drop out, leave college, fade from my life completely until a year later I see her across the street wheeling a carriage and I can’t tell if there’s a baby inside or a bag of empty cans.
*****
Beth Sherman has an MFA in creative writing from Queens College, where she teaches in the English department. Her stories have been published in Portland Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Blue Lyra Review, Sandy River Review, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dreams, Flash Boulevard, Sou’wester and elsewhere. She is also a Pushcart Prize and multiple Best of the Net nominee, including a 2023 BOTN nomination for flash fiction.
