Background

You think you know
your background,
but it’s tricky.
A roomful of English teachers
calls biology your specialty.
Where scientists admire
those years you gave to Latin,
your classics major best friend
thinks growing up poor
taught you all your lessons.
Maybe the chameleon
never changes.
It merely flinches,
and look—oh, look!
what rearranges.

Justin Jannise is a poet originally from southeast Texas. He won the Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize for Poetry and the Elmore A. Willets Prize for Fiction, from Yale University, in 2009. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
*Photo courtesy of Patrick Q.
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