If I insisted on being a teacher,
Uncle Harry had the best advice:
Listen, Asshole, never turn your back
on the class—and he demonstrated how
by handing me the leash to his giant killer dog,
Mr. Pooch, and then turned himself into
a pretzel of a man in half-glasses
with a crazed, asymmetrical look,
his arm turned an impossible angle
stabbing the air with phantom chalk
on a phantom chalk board.

In a day or two, I discovered,
even were I to master this contortion,
I’d only be an annoyance
to the kids I pretended to teach—
a fly on Pooch’s ass, and maybe if lucky,
I’d get evicted when he shook his barbed tail
and sent anything on it for a spin.
Mostly, my fate was to be ignored,
which, looking back, seemed wisdom-plenty
for 8th graders to possess.

Many of them were large for their age,
and a few were already men and women of the world
who made clear they were not to be taken for fools—
The Pearl, again, A Separate Peace,, again,
and Warriner’s First Grammar, again.
One girl, Tonya, looked at me with some pity and said,
Man, you got to be tough with these kids.
This is the damn ghetto.
True, I hadn’t been to the Bronx before,
though many times I had just driven through.