From: Chorus from the Land of Grownups
by Alane Lucas
She staples her plaid skirt shut. The buttons shot off, she says. I want to ask whose glitter press-on nails I found beneath a desk, whose clot of blood I smeared with my shoe in the girls' bathroom. I visited it a few days later. It had dried and flaked, as if scratched by someone's fingernail.
There's a lesson on how to sit properly going on in the cafeteria. (Don't straddle.) There's also a Student Council meeting about ways to get the boys to stop chewing tobacco and masturbating in the lavatory between classes. They've been writing on the walls with themselves.Alane Lucas is a pseudonym. This piece is part of a novella-in-verse that is set in a Catholic secondary school; it is a companion work to a poetry collection entitled "Theology of the Body: a feminist response to the lectures of Pope John Paul II."