The bell rings and I flinch,
quickly, reflexively. I pack my books into my bag, slowly, hanging onto each
second I have left before English. The rest of the class filters out, dripping
into the hallway, flooding it with teens and hormones and Monday grunge and wet
rain boots. I join at the end of the mob, trudging sluggishly over watery
footprints.
The halls are mostly clear by the
time I make it to the English wing. I pause, I halt, I wince outside the
doorway. The poetry unit started last week. I had nightmares about the
dissections. We tore apart each stanza, each line, with scalpels and teeth and
ragged claws. We tied each word to a chair, squirming, squinting under a bald
bulb, bruised and begging, and we made it spit out definitions it didn’t have.
Words cannot be cut in meter and
verse. Words are marvelous, magical, infinitely deep. I can run my fingers over
words, taste each one and let them melt on my tongue, press my ear against a
sentence and listen to the endless echos within. But poetry slaughters. Poetry
makes rules and rips and tears. Poetry ties the wrists of ideas together and
throws them into boiling water, burning them down to nothing, while they
scream, still living, still feeling.
I step back, recoiling, retreating.
I can’t handle it, not today, not now, but the teacher sees me before I can
escape. “Class is starting,” she says pointedly, accusingly, and nods to a
chair in the first row. Painfully, I drag myself over to sit. On the board, in
perfect, painstaking, penmanship is Emily Dickinson’s Hope.
"Hope"
is the thing with feathers
That perches in
the soul
And sings the tune
without the words
And never stops at
all.
“Read,” she commands. I do, slowly,
stumbling. It’s abstract, it’s artsy, clipped and organized. “Now,” she starts,
“what literary devices do we find in this poem?” She’s still staring at me. I squirm, I fidget, and I’m trapped. My heart
reaches out to hope, trapped between two quotation marks. The word is maimed,
beaten and bruised, cuffed, strapped under markings, and stares up at me with
sad eyes. Hope is not one thing with feathers, Hope should be everything,
anything, uncountable. I stare into the pit of possible meanings, teetering on
the edge of the cliff filled with broken words and fragments of chopped and
bloody sentences. “Hope?” I say, and I hope, hope, hope she’ll let it go.
“No,” she chides, "Hope is not
a literary device. However, personification, metaphor, and alliteration are all
examples of acceptable answers.” And suddenly, the hope feels completely gone, and
everything is clinical. Personification, metaphor, and alliteration.. My breath
quickens. Personification, metaphor, and alliteration. The words on the board swirl off into the air
around me. Personification, metaphor, and alliteration. The hope is dead, a
broken winged bird that was pushed out of its nest. Personification, metaphor,
and alliteration. “’S’cuse me,” I
mutter, and I slide from my seat, making a dash for the girl’s bathroom down
the hall.
I sit on the lid of the toilet so I
can pull my feet up and wrap my arms around my legs. Comforting. I take a deep
breath and lean my head back. Words don’t need places. Organization. Words
don’t need surgery. Dissection. There’s a knock on the stall door.
Interruption.
“The teacher sent me to get you. I
know you’re in there.” A girl from class. A Dickinson fan. Her words are
clipped, pruned, polished, perfectly placed. A place for everything and
everything in its place. There’s a pause. “No,” I say.
She sighs, heavily, and I hear her
lean again the stall door. “What’s your issue anyway?” I can’t tell her,
because I can’t explain it, because I don’t have words, because I have too many
words, because words don’t fit, words don’t mean what you need them to, trying
to fit words in a sentence is like trying to pin insects to a corkboard. If you
can get them to stay still, you’ve killed them. I shudder. She’s still outside,
still waiting.
“Metrophobia,” I say. There. That’s
a word. A heavy word. It carries all of me with it. “What?” she asks.
“Fear of poetry,“ I admit.
There’s another pause. She doesn’t
believe me, she doesn’t understand. She tries again.
“I could probably tutor you, you
know, if you want.”
If I could, I would boil down the
thoughts in my head into words like her. I would tear them apart, rip off their
wings, and pin them down. But I can’t bring myself to. They’re too precious,
too infinite, with staggeringly vast meanings and inexhaustible choices. And I
am meaningless, miniscule, teetering only on the brink of English language. She
sighs again, and a few minutes later, I hear her walk away. I stay in the stall
for the rest of the period.
That night, the nightmares come
back. I dream of a bird, and at first it’s flying, soaring, free. Out of
nowhere, there’s a gunshot, and it falls out of the sky, plummeting. I’m
tearing through brush and trees and hills that seem to sprout even as I’m
running, but I can’t get to it in time. They’re already plucking it naked,
stripping it, ripping it to pieces and running off. Then there are birdcages,
iron bars locking out light, and I realize I’m the one in the cage. I’m in a classroom now, watching my words
being written out on the board, everything I’ve said and everything I’m
thinking. Students come up and cross out my words, one by one, and I throw
myself against the cage, fighting, and I open my mouth to stop them, but I find
that I can’t yell. Once they’ve crossed out every word, I don’t have anything
left to say. Hope is just a thing with feathers. Personification, metaphor, and
alliteration. I wake up, panicking, tangled in the bed sheets and covered in
sweat. Panting, I touch my throat. “Words,” I whisper, my voice cracking,
“words, I have words.”
The next afternoon is my first
meeting with the school counselor. She wears a white blouse and dark slacks,
all over-starched and perfectly creased. Her eyebrows are plucked too high, and
she looks a sadistic, malicious, odious. I chew on a hangnail as I stare at her
from the beaten couch the other side of the room.
“You’ve missed six English classes
this semester,” she says, slowly, as though I don’t know, as though this is new. I bite at my finger more, tearing away a
sliver of skin. “You’re doing fine in all of your other classes. Could you tell
me a little about English?” She stares steely at me. The world slows down to
just this moment. I notice suddenly that she doesn’t move when she breathes. Either
she’s holding her breath, or she can inhale without expanding. I say nothing,
and she sits still. Waiting. She’s not going to move until I say something.
Nervously, I wipe my spitty fingers on my jeans. “I don’t like poetry.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just, not my thing.”
“Is it difficult for you?”
“Well, not exactly.”
Her nostrils flare as she takes in
a little breath and purses her lips. So she is breathing. Interesting. She
drums her fingers lightly across her knee. She’s craving a conventional answer;
she wants it simple and straight, in as little words as possible. She’d be a good poet.
“I just, think it’s wrong, you
know?”
“Wrong? How?”
I take a deep breath and try to
steady myself.
“Like, if I wanted to tell you
about something, I would use the words that best described it, instead of only
using words that rhyme and beat together. It’s not really fair.
“Fair to who?”
“Fair to the words.”
Her eyebrows draw close. She didn’t
expect this. She’s puzzled, flummoxed. She clears her throat with a tidy little
“humph” and brushes her confusion under the table.
“Do you think that justifies
skipping class?”
“I’m not comfortable with being in
the room.”
“Don’t you think it’s better for a
student to study than to skip class when they find things difficult?”
There she goes again, with the
“difficulty thing.” It’s not difficult, no, how hard is it to commit murder? It’s
a simple act. The problem is that it’s terrifying. The slaughter is wrong, it’s
hopeless. She starts to launch into a speech she gives dozens of times a day,
about how we can work together to find a tutor and do better in class, but I
cut her off.
“There are students who skip
biology when the class does dissections.”
“Pardon?” She asks. She’s off guard
again.
“Some students aren’t comfortable
with being in the room. And it’s ok for them to leave.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t the case
here. Some students have specific issues-”
“I have issues with poetry,” I cut
her off, but she’s beyond listening.
“-or they may fear dissections, or
have conflicting religious beliefs. You’re not in the same situation. You’re
skipping English class simply to avoid poetry.”
She’s accusing me now, spouting
meaningless, worthless, useless things at me.
“I’m metrophobic,” I tell her. “I
have metrophobia. Fear of poetry.”
She ignores this. “I know it may
seem difficult-“
“It’s not difficult!”
“I don’t understand what you’re-“
“You don’t! Nobody does!” I’m
yelling now, leaning dangerously forward on the worn couch, grasping at the
edge of the cushion. “You don’t get it!”
The words fall from the air and
stale quickly, turning the room fetid, rancid. She purses her lips again. The silence
is long, much too long, and finally, she mutters, “Maybe we should take a
break, and I can try to recommend someone a little better suited to help you.”
She stands, smoothing her blouse,
and stepping briskly out of the doorway into the hallway of counseling offices.
I hear her pumps click, hard snaps on the linoleum. I let go of the couch and
lean back, caught by the cushions. Looking up at the ceiling, I sigh heavily.
This feels ridiculous. Words drift in from the hall, and I can hear half of a
conversation. The counselor has her control again, spouting her meaningless
buzzwords, which limp, broken, back down the hall to me.
“…depression… frustration…needs
help…try something else”
I recognize myself in her
description. I close my eyes, pulling my legs up on the couch, and wrap myself
small. I know someone will be here to pick me up soon. I’m relieved, in a way.
Words are getting too heavy.
I skip the rest of the day, and I’m
kept home Wednesday, too. “Just a mental health day,” I’m told. Maybe I am
sick. The next day, the weather is still rainy. The whole world is hopeless and
grey. I’m told I’ve been lucky enough to get an appointment with a psychologist
who may be able to help. I slouch against the passenger seat, leaning against
the cold inside of the rain-splattered window. I don’t know how I got out of
school again today. Every few minutes, my mom glances over at me. I think she’s
scared I’ll disappear before we even arrive. They want to fix me, they want to
help. I’m done fighting it. They’ll tie me up, boil me down, cut out my words
one by one. How poetic.
The woman who greets us is young,
prettier, softer. She shakes my hand and smiles at me. I don’t smile back. She
leads me to her office. It’s modern, the chairs are sleek leather, even the
lampshade matches the throw rug. She moves to a chair and gestures to one
facing her on the other side of a dark coffee table. As I sit down, she tells
me, “I don’t like poetry either.” This time, I’m the one caught off guard.
“Sorry, what?”
“That’s what you’re scared of,
isn’t it? Poetry? Your mom told me you have metrophobia.”
“Then my mom also probably told you
she doesn’t think metrophobia is a real thing.”
“Why do you say that?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Is that what you think?” She tilts
her head slightly, genuinely curious. She waits, calmly, patiently.
“No, I think I’m really scared of
it. “
“That’s fine,” she says, and
settles into her chair. I fidget nervously, but she doesn’t seem like she’s
going to say anything more.
“So, you don’t like poetry?” I ask.
She shakes her head, “Nope. Too
many rules. I like poetry without rules”
“Without rules?”
“Yes. When you don’t follow a
pattern, anything can be a poem. Even just writing down your thoughts,” she
says. “Sometimes, a poem can give a word
even more power than it had before.” She takes the notebook and pen from her
lap and holds them out to me. “Why don’t you try?” I stare doubtfully,
nervously, at her, but she looks sincere. I reach out and take them. The
notebook is completely blank. She doesn’t speak as I flip through the pages,
testing. She really expects me to do this.
“Just try,” she says, “Write
whatever comes to mind.”
Slowly, I trace out the word “hope.” I pause
for a moment. “Is the thing, that’s in a lot of things,” I write. I write more
before I can stop myself. No rules. “Hope is everywhere. And sometimes it
flies, and sometimes it sits or crawls or edges in where you least expect it.” It’s
not a poem. Jut words, filling the entire session and page with hope, over and
over, unlocking its cage and little by little, taking it back.
“Our time is just about up,” she
tells me, interrupting me, startling me.
“It’s not much of a poem,” I tell
her, offering back the notebook. She takes it and reads it, slowly, savoring
each word the way I would.
“It’s lovely. It makes a fantastic poem,” She says,
puts it on the table, sliding it over to me.
“But you didn’t analyze it,” I
point out, “How can you say it’s fantastic if you didn’t look for meter or
rhythm or literar-,” I cough, choking on this. “Or literary devices?”
“Not everything needs to be torn
apart to be understood,” she tells me.
“Isn’t it your job to analyze me?”
She smiles, “Sometimes, you can
understand more just by listening and reading than trying to analyze.”
And I smile back. She tears out my
paper and hands it over to me. I fold it in half, then in half again, smaller,
tighter, but it doesn’t matter so much now. Even if someone took out their red
correcting pen and crossed out each word, one by one, I would be words ahead of
them. I have hope.
