Praying for Eyebrowz

I am a teacher. I teach English at the high school of an independent district within Oklahoma City. I love my job. I love your kids. I call them my kids. I keep blankets in my room for when they’re cold. I feed them peanut butter crackers, beef jerky, or Pop Tarts when Michelle Obama’s school breakfast or lunch isn’t enough to fill their bellies. I comfort them when they cry and I praise them when they do well and always I try to make them believe that they are somebody with unlimited potential no matter what they go home to when they leave me.

What do they go home to? Sometimes when they get sick at school they can’t go home because you and the person you’re currently shacking up with are too stoned to figure out it’s your phone ringing. Sometimes they go home to parents who don’t…

Ikebana (You without You)

Between frames, between presence and negation, authority.

If your body lies in the earth, why are you here?

Limits admired and sought: the way of the flower.

I pluck leaves from the lower half to achieve balance.

Shape and line detach, yet comprise the whole.

My father, awake in his chair, mourns quietly.

A naked twig forms one point of the scalene triangle.

Starkness implies silence, resonates depth.

Heaven, earth, man, sun and moon invoke your absence.

As you trickle through the interval’s night.

* * *

Ikebana is the art of Japanese flower arrangement.

Man of the Year, Most Influential Woman, the 10 Best Dressed, the 100 Richest People – there’s no shortage of reference guides for who to admire. There are a lot of accomplished people out there. Our little town is full of them. We go to big dinners and the admirable people get Trailblazer Awards or Volunteer of the Year Awards; we listen to speeches, applaud and go home. It’s all good. But I’m not really impressed by all that. It leaves me flat, doesn’t speak to my life.

Here are the people I admire:

* People who understand the phrase ‘there but for fortune go you or I.”

* People who say they were wrong and they say it in front of a lot of people.

* Folks who have been publicly humiliated by their own actions or the actions of others who keep their shit together and come back…