WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW

by Shelly Blankman

Kids at school were cruel. They’d call her flaky. crazy, 

space cadet, airhead. She’d forget their names or where

she was going. School bells and fire alarms would echo

in her head, and her world would blur. The mockery was 

momentary. The misery would be incessant.

The last week of school, classmates autographed her 

yearbook with the labels and comments they’d hurled

to her at school. The five-minute walk home was endless.

At home, she flopped on her bed and muffled her sobs

with pillows, bursting her dam of tears.

No one knew what she’d been through. No one knew she’d

had brain surgery as a child. No one knew she had epilepsy.

Everyone could see her big head. The boys would flick it and

tug at her hair when the teacher wasn’t looking. She would 

wince, but dared not weep. Feigning fearlessness was her

armor that would be rusted by tears. As time passed, the bullies

were gone, but some labels remain.

Gus Walz stands in full view of the nation. His dad is running

for vice-president of the United States. His son has a nonverbal

learning disorder. He has no armor. He needs no armor. His dad

starts to speak. That’s my dad! he yells to the audience. His tears

flow freely. They are borne of pride, not shame. Cameras focus on him.

His tears of pride are posted on computers coast to coast. His

joy is fodder for their jokes. 

They knew there was something wrong with him.What they don’t

know is kindness. They have much to learn from people like Gus.  

Author’s Note: Gus Walz at the DNC being bullied by adults who should know better reminded me of own experience of being bullied in school for behavior that no one understood

Shelly Blankman lives in Columbia, Maryland with her husband of 44 years. They have two sons, Richard and Joshua, who live in New York and Texas, respectively. They have filled their empty nest with four rescue cats and a dog. Richard and Joshua surprised Shelly with the publication of her first book of poetry, Pumpkinhead. Her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Verse-Virtual, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Open Door Magazine, among others.

ODE TO MY SHOPPER

by Sharon Olson

I was seventy-one and still counting
when I counted the grocery bags arriving
at my front door, each one labelled
I guess for the shopper’s convenience,
some mnemonic only he had derived,
Poems 1 of 8, Poems 2 of 8, and so forth,
and they were like poems, each item
of slightly different size and voice,
tuna can haikus next to sonnets of milk.

I chalked it up to coincidence, until
the next week new bags came, this time
marked Lyric 1 of 7, Lyric 2 of 7, so
we knew we were in some sort of
telepathic, telegrammatic finger-
tapping sync-apathy, as if he knew
I must write poems and would eat
to write them, not eating words
but snippets of lyric, edible syllables.

The market has stipulated one week
between orders, and I am as I said
earlier seventy-one and still counting.
And so I find myself wondering
what the next code will bring, what
subliminal message my messenger
will write to signal our connection.
He must be a poet, too, composing
behind the front lines and so essential.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian, 71 and still counting. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where along with everyone else she waits it out. Her grocery bags truly did arrive marked as mentioned in the poem.