RULES FOR TEACHERS, SOMEWHERE IN THE USA, 2023

by Cecil Morris

Attending a drag show at Hamburger Mary’s, and later posting about it on social media, led to Kristi Maris losing her teaching job of nearly 20 years, she wrote on Facebook. —Houston Public Media, July 26, 2023

You shall not attend drag shows
as drag might rub off on you
like the contagion we disbelieve
and you might drag it then to school
where you indoctrinate children
in the unspeakable pleasures
of women’s undergarments
and torture shoes and cult behavior.
You shall not mention slavery
in the same breath as oppression
or affirmative action or
reparations though you can note
how slavery afforded some slaves
with advantageous skills they used
to their own betterment later.
You shall not criticize your boss
or your boss’s lackeys for their
support of policies or practices
either ignorant, ill-informed,
or cruel, or, really, speak any
words not explicitly spelled out
in the approved curriculum.
You shall as much as humanly
possible act and speak and dress
and think in the same Godly way
as your employer does or says
he or she or they does or do. 

Cecil Morris taught high school English for 37 years. Now retired, he spends his time writing poems and shaking his head at the news. He has poems in or forthcoming from Cimarron Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Sugar House Review, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.

THE PROBLEM OF WHITENESS

by Darrell Petska

Snow-covered Abraham Lincoln
statue in front of Bascom Hall
 Photo by Jeff Miller, University
of Wisconsin-Madison Photo Library.

Republican legislators in Wisconsin are threatening to reject the University of Wisconsin-Madison's requests for additional state funding unless an elective course they find offensive is cancelled and its professor is fired. Rep. Dave Murphy, chairman of the Wisconsin Assembly’s Committee on Colleges and Universities, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he believes the course “The Problem of Whiteness” contributes to “the polarization of races in our state.” —Slate, December 22, 2016 

Some rubes in America's Dairy Stand
say U'd better teach just what they command
or they'll wave their Nazi luger
i.e. hold back on their lucre—
curdling Dairy into the New Reich Land.

Darrell Petska's writing appears in The Missing Slate, Whirlwind, Verse-Virtual, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, previously in TheNewVerse.News, and numerous other publications. Darrell cut short his career as a university editor to be the arbiter of his own words. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.