THE ENGLISH TEACHER PENS A LETTER TO TECH CEOS

by Alejandro Escudé

An afternoon grading on the internet, I walk out

To the November skies of Los Angeles, warm,

A day moon more orb-like than usual in the east.

The sun a shining lake behind fair weather clouds.

I’m thinking of you. How you stalked us in our 

Classrooms for years, removing first our books.

Taking our grades and popping them on screens

That would never time out, even on vacations.

It’s you I blame whenever I can’t direct students

To a specific page, numbers eliminated long ago,

The corners, dog-eared, the scanning of the hand

Across print to mark a quote, to seize an argument.

But I’m a gnat on a remote beach of the economic

Planet to you staring at a sea of adolescents with 

Endless passwords tattooed on their brains. Strolling,

I spot a Yellow-rumped Warbler shadowing me along 

The side of the road. An intelligence, a god, birthed

Of the moon and sun. Buffering, my human hopes.

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.

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 COST OF MAGIC

by Brian O'Sullivan

Union leaders say the traditionally high status of teachers in Ireland is under threat due to a combination of issues such as pay, workload, limited promotional posts and the growing complexity of the job. So, is teaching still an attractive profession? We asked delegates at teachers’ unions annual gatherings. —“Is Teaching Still an Attractive Profession?” The Irish Times, April 11, 2023

Orla Ryng told The Irish Times that “that magic

of being in the classroom is still there.” That magic

turns a student’s face from the cell phone’s dim light

to the brightness of a peer and an idea. That magic

turns some paper mache into a volcano,  and it

turns jumbled numbers into that kind of magic

spell mathematicians call a formula, and it even turns

the mangled words of social media into that magic

that I—and you, I bet?—value just about the most:

Words that leap and love and shout that magic,

which is to say poetry, will never die. And it’s with words

and letters that teachers are rewarded—like that magic

“N.T.” that got dangled off the ends of National Teachers’ names

in Ireland. My dad, being Irish, seemed to believe in that magic;

he asked, as I trudged through grad school, when I’d

be getting “the letters after [my] name,” that magic

“Ph.D.,” and I thought he was just teasing me, but later

I knew that even he, a practical guy, valued that magic

of letters. But letters don’t pay rent, and so Sean

Maher lives with his parents, still valuing that magic

That devalues him. Economists may

say that if you get good money and you also get that magic,

then you’ve been paid twice. ‘No one goes into teaching

expecting huge wages,” says Eoin Fenton; that magic

serves in place of huge wages, and asking for both money and magic

might be hubris. But would it, in the end, be all that tragic?

Brian O'Sullivan teaches literature and rhetoric in southern Maryland. He has had creative writing published in ONE ART, The Galway Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual, and Every Day Fiction.

MESSAGE TO MY DAUGHTER: WE COULD HAVE DIED TODAY

by Marsha Owens

A child weeps while on the bus leaving the Covenant School. (Nicole Hester/The Tennessean/AP via The WashingtonPost

but we did not… because having finished elementary, middle, and high school, also college, you, thank God, are still alive, and then you majored in education, once a noble profession, spent years as  an elementary school teacher and, with experience, qualified to be an assistant principal, but awhile back, you left the teaching profession for good because you decided it was   not a hill to die on (my words, not yours), and I retired from teaching years ago carrying my life with me, so I say now ‘thank you, Jesus,’  though I doubt Jesus has anything to do with this carnage that tramples America and children and schools today, that declares guns rank higher on the scale of necessities than education,  teachers, and  children’s lives.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA, and at times, along the banks of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, The Dead Mule, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Rat’s Ass Review, Rise Up Review, PoetsReadingtheNews, and The New Verse News. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is available by Finishing Line Press.

MOUNDS OF BOOKS OUTSIDE OF NASHVILLE

by Zebulon Huset

My freshmen students start Fahrenheit 451 next week—

today a Tennessee pastor lights back into the old chestnut

 

of Harry Potter infecting children with witchcraft or Twilight 

spreading the cheesy demons of vampiric thoughts. Roiling 

 

on the self-righteous fury of the Neo-Nazi echo chamber

that rebounds cacophonous  insecurities and fear like

 

the crystals that create a great fortress of solitude. Riled 

up by the downfall of monuments raised by Daughters

 

of the Confederacy, by schools teaching history

that covers even half of the truth about their great

 

grandparents, by the ricocheting of rage. Opposite

of a sensory deprivation tank that saps sounds

 

and light and leaves one with just the mortal drumbeat,

overwhelming sound of blood pulsing through ear-arteries.

 

The realization that self is both loud and fragile,

that our brittle hold on life can crumble at any moment

 

and it’s not witchcraft or the past that are frothing

at the doorway of extremism, but the hand grasping

 

the bulk-purchased bottle of lighter fluid, the voice

booming from their own mouths, the fire lapping

 

their stubby little fingertips.

 

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Rattle, Texas Review, North American Review, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, and many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked.

THE ARMED TEACHER

by Anna M. Evans

I own an arsenal of ways to think,
and choose the weapon just as I see fit.
I’m packing color markers and red ink;
my Power Points are reinforced with wit.

I used a Glock once, at a rifle range,
but, even muffled, couldn’t stand the sound.
I wasn’t a bad shot, but it was strange,
the way the target swung with every round.

Sometimes I think, what if it happened here?
I’d lock the door, of course. I know the drill.
But every day we need to fight the fear,
and fear’s not something you can shoot to kill.

So, you can keep your bullets, guns and knives.
I’m armed with words, and working to save lives.

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press. 

HELL IS PUNGENT WITH GUNS

(My Neighbor Calls Gun Owners ‘Beelzeguns,’ 

Says They Call Themselves ‘Gun Nuts’ 

Because Otherwise They Don’t Have Any Balls)

Graphic from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

by Ron Riekki


There have been two killed and twenty injured
by gun violence in the U.S. since Parkland.*
The melting pot is melting because of climate
change and the heat of being ambushed by
a blizzard of shrapnel. I taught a course on gun
violence and near the halfway point a student’s

girlfriend was shot and killed on campus. Life
used to stand until a Loaded Gun carried me
away to my graveyard shift where I don’t teach
anymore, sunk into the valley of security,
unarmed security, where I’m paid to stay awake
and at night, in the mountains of dark I remember

a kid telling me during that class that he used to take
his gun and shoot it at the lake at his parents’ camp,
December, Alabama, trying to make the bullets
skip. I asked him if he thought he might have
killed someone by mistake doing that and he told
me, Nah, no one was around for miles. There’ve

been more than two killed, more than twenty injured
now since.* Since. In Detroit, I remember a moment
on the street where someone commented on
another person’s visible bullet-hole scar.  He
lifted up his shirt to reveal more and then a bunch
of those nearby started sharing their bullet holes,

pant legs rolled up, shirts off, the drinking
of wounds. In Virginia, I delivered a Feast Pizza
to a trailer where the guy sat on his historical sofa
holding an old shotgun pointed at my college chest.
I asked what the hell he was doing and he said,
I just wanted to see your reaction. His girl-

friend told him to put the gun down,
but he didn’t. When I got back to the Dominos,
one of the other drivers asked, Did he do it to you?
He likes to do that to everyone who delivers there.
A cop told me about a kid who got shot in the eye
and the bullet ricocheted and came out the other eye.

During EMT class, the instructor asked if any
of us had been shot and one of the students
raised his hand; he’d shot himself by mistake,
cleaning his gun. The instructor told us a story
of how he got shot by a kid when he was doing CPR
on a rival gang member that they didn’t want saved.

By a kid, I mean a child. By a child, I mean that we
are drowning in the shallow end. After school shootings,
gun sales go up. I mean, throw up. As in puke. “It’s too
soon to talk about gun control.”  Hell, it’s too late.
Graffiti by my apartment says, What You Rape
Is What You Sewer with an AR-15 policed underneath,

plastered to the wall, pulverized to the wall in onyx
paint. Two times in my life, when talking about gun
control, I’ve had a person reach over and pull a gun out
of nowhere. Anti-magic. One was under a couch.
Another in a purse. As if guns were cigarettes.
As if guns were TV channels. As if the guy who lived

across from me in Chicago wasn’t shot and killed
in his apartment. My favorite superheroes never
use a gun. That’s for villains. Batarangs and bat-darts—
sure, but I always prefer those who simply outsmart, whose
sheer intelligence comes out. The opposite of those
who cure guns with guns, who stop choking by choking

more. The king of choking. We elected the king
of choking. Chos—a Persian word for fart.  The NRA chos-
king. A rump . . . Real hunters use bow-and-arrow. They bow
before the flesh and honor the animal by using every
body part, not sitting next to an elephant, leaning
against its belly with the gun in his crotch. Cowards.


*Accurate as of February 21, 2018. The numbers have enlarged since then.


Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).

EGG RACE

by Devon Balwit

Image by Melodi2 via Answer Angels.

I write hate crime, mass shooting, extremist,
target, victim, second amendment, make
my students copy and pronounce, make
them lift their heads from their phones
and listen, all of us awkward, the ones
fasting for Ramadan, the ones who may
be gay, the ones who, secretly, do not care,
Orlando a place they’ve never heard of
in a country they barely know; they want
my language, not my history, and this lesson,
they can do without, my fumbling to do
justice to horror, while balancing the fragile
egg of blame in my tiny spoon, trying to dash
to the finish without letting it fall, homophobia,
intolerance, assault rifles, class ends and
I’ve taught something; none of us sure what.

Devon Balwit is a writer and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest.  Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News twice before. Her recent work has appeared or will soon in The Fog Machine, The Cape Rock, The Fem, Of(f) Course, drylandlit_press, and The Prick of the Spindle.

VALUE ADDED TEACHERS

by Ann Bracken

Image source: Precarious Faculty Rising

She feels frustrated
as she rumbles around in cramped offices
with all the people shouting
Words don’t matter.
Especially when she hears graduates
of the university
referred to as output.

When people become output
there is no need for nurture.
Sewage pipes have output,
as do factories that churn out row after row
of standardized parts.

In cramped classrooms and windowless lecture halls
teachers are gauged by their productivity--
here every human complexity is reduced
to a series of data points, quantified and measured,
success or failure—positive or negative output.

These days she no longer relishes
seeing joy or surprise or the flash
of an ah-ha moment on her students’ faces.
Instead of planning for a field-trip to the meadow
for a sensory experience,
she spends time trying to quantify
commitment, measure amazement
and determine a cut score for
how much inspiration one needs
for a journey into the unknown.


Ann Bracken is an educator and writer whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century,  Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire:Love Poems, Praxilla, New Verse News, Scribble, The Museletter, and The Gunpowder Review. Ann’s poem, “Mrs. S” was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. In addition to teaching professional writing at the University of Maryland College Park and working as a poet in the schools, Ann presents frequently at writing and creativity conferences including Mindcamp of Toronto, Florida Creativity, the Maryland Writers’ Association, the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, and The Creative Problem Solving Institute.