Beth Weinstock
Nov 1 · 1 min read

Dear Emily of Sixth Grade

How youthful our sensorium:

girl near girl, a school

and its red-brick body

pressed forward,

eager to leave

the long decade.

A TV on a wheeled cart lit

with images of the hollow

and the light — bones

tumbled into earth, soldiers

liberated in black and white,

a shuttle exploded then divided

in streaks of gauzy smoke,

girls our size scattered

and running from villages.

Outside is spring, and a mass grave

of flies forms in the window well,

and here our faces float

in the darkness of the room.

The sudden idea like shrapnel

across the hot and sleepy room —

that we will be large out there,

that we might build houses

on top of these funeral parlors

in our minds,

we don’t even know

what from someday,

we don’t know how lonely,

don’t know how walking

our children past well-lit gardens

we will grow older, smaller

like ice caps melting.

But here in this classroom,

Emily of sixth grade, we sit

only us — alive in the strangest way,

our four small hands low-amplitude

in their tremor, hidden in our laps,

shuddering with promise to run

step by every step ahead

of the explosion.

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