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Mockingbird
by Melissa King Rogers

July 1, 2014 Contributed By: Melissa King Rogers

At nineteen my former student jacks a car
with a toy gun. Give me the keys!
he says, but he carries her groceries in,
unlocks her door—can’t leave her
alone in the cold, she looks so scared.
Not even an hour later he’s in handcuffs.
He’ll get fifteen. Ten if they go easy,

a soft judge. I can still see him
in detention, another heart-to-heart
on follow-through, some shit story,
yes ma’am, yes ma’am. Bless him, he cares
more about failing me than flunking Lit.
Says he’s loved every book since freshman year
and swears he doesn’t even like to read
and tells me I’m his favorite teacher ever—
as if he fears I’ll bear his failures

as my own. How this boy does this?
His mother can’t find words to tell me why.
She mimes a toy gun he once played with
like she’s sifting through hand-me-downs
she can’t give up. Her last hope’s
my letter to show the judge her son’s
good heart. To be mother, she says.
It is so hard. You have child?

He has her face, delicate Ethiopian bones
cut clean as a cameo. His mug shot
could be the tender boy I taught at fourteen
the year my own son was born, baby skin
smooth and unblemished, heavy lashes,
dark wet eyes that welled up in disbelief
when Maycomb killed Tom anyway,
when even Atticus could not save him.

Return to table of contents for Issue 8 Summer 2014.

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Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2014

Further Reading

Breaking Currents: eddy at M23
by Corey Durbin

An eddy, the titular inspiration for this show, is a flowing water phenomenon where the current is disrupted by inverse movement, causing a whirlpool. This exhibit of young emerging sculptors makes a similar gesture against a cultural current, long spiraling toward doom. M23 is a small gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the […]

SIX DAYS’ LAMENT by Joe Wilkins

I think I disagree that there is a quantum leap between living and non-living. —George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School So at nineteen he gave his life to God, & now—hands slippery as fish, skin pocked & spotted, beard falling, simply falling from his face— he asks about that girl I knew, the […]

THE READER by Robert Walser (translated by Daniele Pantano)

With one of those train station dime store books, he settled into his nest. He saw how the hotel governesses banished him with their disapproving stares. The nest I’ve just mentioned bribed him with its privacy, it was a fine spot shaded by delicate twigs, above him and his book, his dreaming, the putti dip […]

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