Breaching
BY ATHENA NASSAR
for my students
Then, after I have introduced voltas,
my book flipped on its dorsal like a humpback whale,
the lines of ink flexing their wingspan
across its pages and marking the grooves
on its throat, after I have starred and underlined
where each enjambed verse carries over
into the next bar, after the sophomore student
majoring in computer science who was there,
in the disinfected dark of the classroom, waiting for me
twenty minutes before the first class began
to tell me he didn’t know how to write a poem
sang a stanza that poemed so hard it ripped
the aurora borealis from the home screen of his laptop
and flung the spinalis of light out onto the desks,
after the student who stayed in his seat
at the end of the last class to ask me, the trochaic meter
of his question tripping over its metrical feet,
why we write poems we are afraid to share
stood up the next day and spat a line so cold,
language so unblunted you’d think it was a guitar pick
stabbed into a slab of ice, after the projector
tucks its lolled out humpback tongue, the breadth
of a Volkswagen bug, back into the wall,
the student who sits at the tail end of the room
furthest away from me, by his teammate,
by the bins of trash, so I can’t see the hairy fringes
of pages that gulp nocturnes into his notebook
raises his hand and recites his first line:
there’s comfort in the rhythm and the way the field
stretches open—
Essay on Words and Where We Got Them From
BY ATHENA NASSAR
Let me tell you something,
my grandmother would say
when she was alive,
pointing her finger at you
from the other side
of the table, the dominoes
in front of her stood
upright like arm hairs
in winter. Carl Phillips
wrote, after the afterlife,
there’s an afterlife.
Words have an afterlife
too, and an afterlife
after that. Born from
the mouth, front feet first
like a calf, snipped
from the umbilical cord
of tongue. When I was fifteen,
I had a US history
teacher, Mr. J, who had a law
degree and who, really,
was overqualified
like the other black teachers
in my high school,
who would always say,
I don’t like nobody
too much, as if to say,
my body has never been
liked too much,
but who years later,
would arrive to campus
early and fall
asleep in his car
in the parking lot
where campus police
tried to arrest him
even though they saw him
everyday, and who,
months later, took his life.
Every now and then,
words are knocked loose
from the top shelf
in the library of our bodies,
smacking against
the floor of our stomachs
with a loud thud.
Even now, when I say,
I don’t like nobody
too much, Mr. J’s face
in the rearview mirror
of my mother’s car,
I am still licking
the amniotic fluid off
his words as if they
were just born, as if
they hadn’t died
with him, and Mr. J
still appears behind
the podium, not liking
everyone an equal
amount, waiting to respond
to his opponents.
