Late Semester Talent Show
Steam wisps from the low roof
of the cafeteria next door.
I watch through chapel windows,
where hanging Christmas wreaths,
dark-rimmed eyes, gaze down at us
sitting in wooden pews. I see her
behind a shadow of brown curls,
hunched over her guitar,
sparrow perched on the lip of the stage.
Her voice pipes above
dozing students, her lyrics rising.
Did I teach her well? Her writing
for class, pure struggle, her fingers
wrapping the pen in a fist. Does her song lift
despite me, my clamp
on nouns and verbs and
form? I don’t know. Just
her single note, light blue,
shearing a line of sky
through this stippled ceiling.
Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems published in Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Whale Road Review, Still: The Journal (2016 Judge’s Choice Award), and elsewhere. Her first full-length poetry collection, Lodged in The Belly, and her first chapbook, Roar of All Septembers, are forthcoming from Main Street Rag. A long-time high school English teacher with literature degrees from Brown (BA) and Indiana University (MA), she lives in Florida with her wife.
Amethyst Review 