To you

 

 

Whose story won’t leave me,

You, wild student, the one

In the back of the room

With three thin-silver spears

Pierced through your ear lobe.

 

You, hunter, bow-and-arrow bearer

With dreams of slowing a swift deer

Lodged within your head, now

Imprinting dark-tipped stars

On the red face of your notebook.

 

You, the one who told me the story

About killing a skunk caught in a box trap;

How the first shot maimed, the second

And third followed, how the skunk’s silence fooled you;

 

Your return to school to say:

He just stared at me, ya know.

 

 

Lisa Alexander Baron’s poetry has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, The Comstock Review, Potomac Review, the Green Hills Literary Lantern, Diner and others. She is a high school journalism teacher who reads with the Philadelphia-based Mad Poets. “To you,”  first appeared in Philadelphia Poets.