Tuesday 7:22 p.m.
One of my students, she wrote
“John Lennon was a man of the standard blues.”
I want to scribble “What the fuck could
this possibly mean?” on her paper.
Instead, I just put question marks of
increasing size (???) in the margins.
I am a coward,
even in the service of exposing kids
to beauty,
which I used to think was my job.
Now, I think it has something to do
with teaching them to survive by
being inconspicuous,
like immaculate trees that grow
close to the ground.
JUSTIN LACOUR lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Posit, Cherry Tree, Presence, Lost Pilots Lit, and other journals.
Read more by Justin Lacour:
Poems in B O D Y
Two Poems in sidereal magazine
Poems in Anti-Heroin Chic