POEMS From Interpretive Work
From Ice-Blink
Uncollected
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Distance Education
In Unalakleet and Gambell, my students,
teachers' aides who need this class
to keep their jobs, learn this week that they must care
about the semi-colon. More
than their properly punctuated sentences,
I want to read what stories
they tell themselves to make
it matter, this stuff that someone who can legislate it
thinks they should find important.
I don't know when the murre eggs
are ready for harvest or when
walrus meat tastes best.
Hard to care about the split
infinitive when ice storms,
when past dues, when shore erosion.
I assign homework they don't do
because they had to take their kids
away from their father or because
cloudberries ripened in the bog.
I look at my spreadsheet of work done
and points assigned. The icon for its program
is green as new shoots of pushki. I fail them.
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