In the left rear rectangular basin
of this segmented school lunch tray
sits an orange, green and yellow
jumble slipped from serving spoon,
a humble geometry demonstration:
spherical dented peas, carrot cubes,
green beans clipped into one-inch
lengths, corn kernal purses. As
a child, I spent hours at the table
from dinner to bed for refusing
to ingest ancestors of the specimens
I almost do not eat today, but for
the fourth grade boy beside me,
pushing peas around his tray.
---

The sun has come back from vacation or the sanatorium, to lighten this afternoon, my mood, the pink-purple-green hair of the woman at the crosswalk - her hair like the popcycle man's rocket bar.

Having published the poetry book for the junior high kids I now bring in models for poems of identity. I've lost the conviction these poems should be shared willy nilly - thrown on Community Center walls and into collections, these kids are so vulnerable to reprisals and physical attack. Many of them write about physical attack. They trust me, and I am tired of feeding their real pain into the fundraising machine that keeps me coming into classrooms. Thursday I saw again the power kids find in writing what they know, they've gone through, and this is real. I told them these poems were between them and the page, to stay within the walls of the room, to, if they wanted, be shared with me, their teacher, but nowhere else unless they chose.

They do not read them aloud to each other.
Each is a sovereign nation.

One girl turned her desk to the wall to write today, hunched close to the file cabinet, shielded then by cabinet and wall, faced away from classmates either working or wiling away the hour cutting eye holes, one boy, from his paper, to make a mask, pretending, one girl, to be a horse and galloping from one end of the room to the other. Two writing resistors began poems in which they claimed to be selling drugs to the teachers. "Make it worse!" I said. Each wrote a complete poem. The poems were wicked-funny. One of them boys wrote "This is a lie" in the middle of his poem, then upped the stakes of evil activity, and the other ratted the mythic drug sellers out at the end: "If you want to find them, they're in room ###." A few weeks ago two teachers failed an in-school drug test. Each teacher in the school was led from her or his classrooms in view of the students by two folks from security. The two teachers were fired.

I had advised the kids to follow the pattern of the model poems, including student work, to write "in third person." Two kids sitting together couldn't get started. When I said, "make it about you, even if you lie, but tell it as 'she/he did this..." not "I did this." They told me nobody ever had explained third person before. That's possible. Or their self-protective armor kept them from listening at the moment this fact was revealed. What these kids need is not curriculum but connection. Is that a buzz phrase? I also know kids who can't write, can't read are expert at distraction, at derailing the process that will lead to the reveal.