SCHOOL DOORS

by Alejandro Escudé

Doors are important in schools.

That’s why when you’re a teacher

they give you lots of keys, keys

that you then have to return when 

you leave for summer break, which

is why leaving for summer break

feels so final, so like confronting

a kind of early retirement, or death.

It’s also why after twenty years

teaching English, I hate doors and

I hate keys, which feel so primitive

to me, those flecks of coded copper

that pinch your upper thigh, get stuck

in your sunglasses, become tangled

up within themselves and you have

to wrestle them free. Once, I lost

a whole set of school keys; I’d

stopped at a gas station and they

slipped out of my dress slacks.

I got home and reached into my

empty pockets, and I felt this

utter panic, my face turned cold.

I drove back and there they were 

beside the fuel pump, laying as if

waiting for me to swipe them.

I looked around and felt a welling

up of gratitude. Who could’ve

had access to this world of youth

that I was in charge of every day?

Who could’ve hurt them? I worked

at a school not long ago who often

left the back door to the gym open.

Mornings, I’d walk by and see

the door propped ajar, inviting 

anyone from off the street to come

inside, take anything they wished

from the locker rooms: gloves,

helmets, jerseys, pompoms, lives.

So I’m empathetic when I read 

about the school shooting, how  

a teacher left the door open. Then 

how it was shown she hadn’t, yet 

locked doors often refuse to stay

locked. Doors like remaining open,

they prefer to welcome others.

I’ve been around school doors

so long, I believe I can hear that 

thing screeching as the shooter 

yanked it back, the big rock 

the teacher had used to prop it 

against the grass, to one side.

And like that—nowhere to hide.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

PASSOVER IN PLAGUE-TIME

by Betsy Mars

after Saeed Jones’s “Boy in a Whalebone Corset”  in  Prelude to Bruise

“The acre of grass is a sleeping swarm of locusts,
and in the house beside it,
tears too are mistaken” for a dark sea,
into which we dip our egg
hoping it will ignite in fertility,
that it will part, a million times—
or whatever is needed—

dividing into heart, lung, legs,
the brain and whatever refrain
we choose to utter
on this, one of the holy days,
to mark our division, and our coming together
a tribe in the end, passed over,
we find our bitter herbs
our unleavened bread

our toilet paper and paper towels shared:
the treasures of this day,
when we marked our doors,
hid inside and hoped to God
he’d pass us by.

Betsy Mars is a poet, educator, photographer, and occasional publisher. Her Kingly Street Press published its first anthology, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife, in October 2019. Her work has recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, The Blue Nib, The Ekphrastic Review, and Silver Birch Press. The daughter of a professor and a social worker, she has had a lifelong interest in issues pertaining to social justice.

DOORS IN THE EYES OF A REFUGEE CHILD

by Debasis Mukhopadhyay

Image source: Provence Today

Doors break loose during transit
They lie scattered across the hills and rivers
Their edges drown in the map
I wait until the ripples turn me out into the street

At times I am old enough to chase them like fireflies
And when I crawl into my dreams
Leaving out the hard parts of travel
Doors smolder crying softly
You are home

Morning brings me back to the waters
And our boat churns its way once more
I keep thinking

How to rip them out of the map


Debasis Mukhopadhyay lives & writes in Montreal. Recent poems have appeared in The Curly Mind, Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With, I am not a silent poet, With Painted Words, Silver Birch Press, Foliate Oak, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Snapping Twig, Eunoia Review, Revolution John, Down in the Dirt, and elsewhere. @dbasis_m