THE LIBRARIAN AT THE SCHOOL WHERE EVERY CHALLENGE SUCCEEDS

by Cecil Morris

Photo by Stu_Spivak

The Bible is among dozens of books [including the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank's diary and numerous books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters] removed from this Texas school district. —NPR, August 18, 2022

I like our high school library now—the high ceiling,

the tall windows inviting light, the shelves throwing

their long shadows onto each other, their blond wood,

so easy to dust and polish now. Something stately,

a little grand, a little minimalist—a kind

of puritan austerity, I think you could say,

now that all the books have been withdrawn, all the ideas

removed from circulation, stored now off site and out

of sight. No more books to face or edge or try to dust,

those uneven tops. No more rows of books to cull

for the out of date, the never read—or checked out,

at least—the ones defaced by flip-page cartoons, or drawn-

in dicks, or very personal slurs that should be kept

to lavatory stalls. No more issuing fines

for books late or lost. I know, as librarian,

I should miss the books, both learned tomes and flights

of fantasy, but this vacuous cleanliness

appeals to my love of order and simplicity,

and the kids—the students—still come in with their phones

where they can find the whole world in bite-size chunks,

where they can Google, scroll, and cite Wikipedia.

And I do not have to check anything out or in

or shush any heads bent over the little lights.

I guess this is what the school board and parents want.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, divides his time between Oregon and California.  He has poems in or forthcoming from 3Elements, Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Scapegoat, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.

BABEL

by Rachel Voss

As a poet in the Internet Age, you find, through a quick search,
that the image you seized upon during a walk to do laundry is not,
sadly, an original one: Trump Tower of Babel.

(And that search just as swiftly uncovers the wisdom of the tarot—
apparently—did you know this?—the Tower card—yes, likely a reference
to Babel—is a trump card which immediately follows the Devil

and is associated with “sudden, disruptive, and potentially destructive
change”—truly, you’ve stumbled into an online abyss of hidden meanings
and Wikipedia distractions.  Return to your laundry.)  Crestfallen,

I do, but realize that as with all myth, it’s what you make of the story
that matters.  Is it a “fact” to hoard like grain in a pyramid built
by literal nonsense, rigid and unyielding?  Or is it a metaphor to continually

mine, one that will somehow always yield gold?  I settle on the latter,
settle into the chatter of the mind, replaying last night’s conversations:
the hungry talk, the ravenous listening, the bread, the wine.

What communion this?  A pop tune, perhaps, a drunken howl—no,
we will never be saints—choral support, the words we somehow all
remember, liked a mantra turned and returned to.

And so the story isn’t about the modern-day Nimrod, the hubris of phallus
gesturing lewdly heavenwards—it’s about the confounding tongues, mysterious
in their multiplicity, voices beautiful in their baffling difference

from our own.  We’ve been talking a lot about ‘doing something’—
and I think the talk, remarkably, is something.  Sing, goddess,
of “a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t” (Bishop)—

a cry that turned into the voice we use when we want to be heard
at a noisy party, or over the din of the city, or ignorance, or when you’re looking
for the right words to say, I can’t understand you, not anymore, we need

to go back to the time when we all used the same language,
a song as elemental as a beating heart, the sound that a human being
makes when it says, I’m here, we exist, and I want you to know

what I mean.

Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher living in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in The Ghazal Page, Hanging Loose Magazine, Unsplendid, 3Elements Review, Silver Birch Press, and Bodega Magazine, among others.