I could cast them in The Grapes of Wrath,
On the road
between here and there, them standing
on the road, smoking a blunt, an odd angle of a girl
in the backseat with her water breaking,
and an artichoke field somewhere up ahead,
but they’re faded and broken down here in the dust,
the pregnant girl so second-hand stoned
from her boy husband’s hot-boxing that she’s
laughing…. An instruction sheet in front of them,
directions, the same as the ones on the board
that I read aloud and explicated, and held up
the protractor to show them. Draw an angle,
any angle, two rays with the same endpoint.
Copy my thumb and forefinger. Pretend
the space between them is an endpoint, the vertex.
I don’t get it, they say, looking away
from everything, a little like a girl in
blissful confusion while a boy fumbles around
down there (I love the way you taste),
or a girl in the beginning of labor,
that kind of blind. On a side street,
a shredding bag of oranges lounges
over several naked branches high in a tree,
bunches of leaves in its curves, dark bulges
that may be leaves or they may be oranges
suffering the crows and rats and mold.
The road itself has boiled up in places.
I show an animation of conjoined rays,
an angle widening. Make it Rain, one boy
sitting by the windows says, signing the sign
for shedding off ones, throwing his invisible stack
in the air for an imaginary dancer.
I’d never thought of an angle widening
as a stripper, or her legs…. but I have known
that welcome panic that overrides everything,
and I have been where they are, and they know I have,
and they are dying to know what it was like
for me, and do I know the miracles they’ve found
in an angle, without ever knowing its measure.
And isn’t this why they are here,
in the school for people who know
the things they know, maybe even before
they should ever know them? I can’t pretend
that every angle out of my mouth is the gospel,
and they can’t pretend to care, one way
or the other
Michelle Mitchell-Foust is the author of Circassian Girl and Imago Mundi, both published by Elixir Press. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, Columbia, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Denver Quarterly.
*Photo courtesy of Mestreech City.