What the Teacher Doesn’t Know
What she does know is that I tend to slump
and fade, engaged in a mile-long stare. Nonetheless,
she thinks I’m fairly smart, since I pass
all announced quizzes, believes I study
when it really counts—that the Big Grades
are my best motivation. In June’s commencement
I will palm a raw oyster into my principal’s hand
as he shakes mine with the right, passes me
the signed and sealed diploma with his left.
Like everyone else I’ll move my tassel across
on valedictorian command and toss the mortarboard
to the intentions of stale AC and the academic wind.

My parents will dispense with wrapping paper,
award me various and sundry gift cards, some
for stores I actually frequent. I will be modestly
celebrated–for sucking on the aglet tips
of my hoody’s draw strings, surreptitiously
(to use a vocab word) vapeing myself
into nicotine buzz and brain shift during class.

I’ll be commended for my ingenuity, but not for
scratching all of the assessment answers onto a stick
of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum with a needle,
popping it in my mouth when I’ve got the hankering
or if the teacher comes around early, inspecting;
I’m always two correct answers short. Wouldn’t want
to raise anyone’s expectations that perfection
might swim around in this primordial cesspool.

When I record formulas on my phone and the teacher
allows me to listen to my music while working arduously
(so many vocab words—vexing and tiresome)
in class; I listen serenely to my own recorded voice
sibilantly crooning x’s and y’s, hydrogen and oxygen
and elemental combinations. What the teacher doesn’t know
is just how hard I work—why that diploma will be something
I’ll admire, impressed by its portents of the near and hazy future—
a printed testament to the world that camouflages me,
blends me in with everybody else—bold face type
hanging on the wall, slightly crooked
and clinging to a half-bent nail.

Lab Partners
You’ve been winning the chalking and charcoal wars
against acne—so you hope your face is inert and in the clear
when Miz Beanson names CeeCee Irons as your lab partner.
CeeCee is awe-inspiring, earth-metal. You feel like your brain’s
a ground nest for hornets and Beanson’s poured gasoline down the hole.

CeeCee’s a granola-eating theatre princess, she dances and sings
elementally—something your chemical mind fears and appreciates.
You’re fond of the sweet smell of benzene, you’ve inhaled enough petrol
to appreciate its psychoactive properties. CeeCee looks at you skeptically

and croons we better get a good grade. You huff in
the scent of CeeCee—aromatic hydrocarbons race up
your cranial reward pathways, releasing dopamine
into the self-conscious cringe of cell death and division.
She’s better than all previous naphthenes and mothballs.
You inform CeeCee: you’re an expert in endothermic
and exothermic reactions, you are the science
behind the pressure-volume relationship
in gases–don’t even get you started on Beer’s Law.

CeeCee knows your reputation, knows all the mad-buzz
on you. Her perfume sucks the air out of your bottled glue;
conductivity, concentrations and solutions all begin to fizzle.
You inform CeeCee that Fe melts at 2800 degrees Fahrenheit,
tell her Iron’s an enigma, strong though it periodically rusts.
Humans need ten to twenty milligrams a day.

CeeCee smiles, eyes you curiously, asks if you’re up on your dosage–
and all that matters, all your particles that you assumed to be
invariant and incorruptible, all of those infallible laws
involving change—they lose their gravimetric proportions—and so,

Dear Mizzus Beanson: lock up the dangerous, turn off
those Bunsen Burners—this combination’s compounded
and the safety shields no longer work. Electrons are charged,
dangerous bonds are now present, you’ve altered course,
fully prepared to blow up acids and bases for this girl.

Boys Be Damned
My brother and I are wretched.
Unfortunates, seated in the front row to funereal rites:
attending my mother’s interment next to Daddy,
the two-person plot they pre-bought now complete
beneath a reverently inscribed name. The preacher
asks for prayer; after a pause, the two of us find ourselves
lost in biblical ululations, laboring lilts and rusted runs
pumping from a veiled woman at the back of the gathering.

Amazing Grace, intended to be sweet—the radiating
sonic invocation washes over our humble flock
with entreaty to our bowed heads, our mournful ears—but
the lady’s passionate intensity rakes me back to a time,
a simple evening of sitting beside my brother, porch-watching
our family’s springtime fields filled with jakes, hens
both young and old; the maturely puffed up gobblers
in their dance-fighting struts, advancing with hopes
to crouched female invitation, seeking permission to copulate.

The old girls were all quietly tired of such ongoing
masculine mating ritual, but one fresh maiden
encouraged a suitor, only to be taken wholly by surprise
when a callous Tom began treading her spine—delivering
his cloacal kiss while she reacted to the brutal nature
of making children by trumpeting through a wild
wild turkey’s twenty-eight different vocalizations
and what my brother called a new Latin twist
of the species Meleagris gallopavo. The strident hymnal

of this woman’s voice washes over the front row’s
head-shaking mourners, colorfully reminding us
of the echoing song still tail-fanning through that
god-awful moment—I know he registers the notes
same as me and I’m going blind trying not to look
at my brother, my heart full with fear that if I even
glance at him I will burst with the inappropriate.
But neither he nor I possess much familial dignity—
we glance sideways, and by the bright shining sun
there is no saving our souls, everyone discovering
what we truly are as we laugh full-gobble
during our own mother’s funeral–graceless,
both of us knowing: there’s no place for us here.

You can learn more about Scott by clicking on his bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/scott-hutchison-bio/