Poetry | R.J. Proffer

I am handed

A mango

Everyone around me has one

I glance at how they hold it

Tightly in their grasp

I squeeze

I peek

They cut into it

Knives that are set aside

I prepare to copy them, teeth set

They scoop it out

The flesh

Bright

Orange

Flesh

Stuck to it was the green peel

I peek about

Some try bites

They taste the green

It stains their teeth

They stop eating, the taste ruined

Others tear the peel away

Leaving wasted meat attached

I stare at mine

Unable to choose

Reading Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath left me with an image, but unlike the one she was describing, looking at the fig tree, I was standing over my sink trying to ascertain how to cut into a mango. Either way I would go about it, it would be difficult. Either decision I made, additional fruit would be wasted. I was frozen, with such an inconsequential decision, on how I would go about it. Life isn’t just an arrangement of choices before you, but one decision at a time, difficult and still simple, with differences seemingly innocuous. What did it matter what city I lived in? Yet it could and should certainly affect who I marry, how my career develops, what graduate school I go to, what experiences I have that lead to writings, and if or how I become a published author.

This is all determined by a few choices that will happen early on, and it could all start with one. I stare at my choices, difficult as they are, because of the work involved, and what stakes they will lead to. And yet….it all starts with one choice.

Should I?

I never was very good at the whole poetry thing. That sounds complete inarticulate, but to be honest my talent was always in the emotion driving a plot, and the characters that felt real to others, that were imperfect beings, with no Mary Sues or Pollyannas (though I shamefully admit I loved her as a child). When it came to poetry however, my lack of a sense of rhythm carried over from dance and sounded awful, in my mind.

Last week I visited Dallas with the other new members of the AVID team at my school. I was excited to be attending this year’s AVID Summer Institute. I was given a thick book filled with group activities for my students next year, and an assignment to mimic a poem by Langston Hughes. I couldn’t mimic the poem well enough, if I’m trying to do something like someone else, it will not work. All I could do was base the poem on my own background in a way, twisting facts as needed for the mood that overtook me in my sleep deprived state. The only thing I managed to do was have their required like of ‘dear facilitator’. I wouldn’t have shared it, but I was happy with the dark ending and my table’s reaction, so here it is!

“Tell me about yourself; bleed your life on the page,

Use pretty words and seduce your reader so they will follow you for an age.”

You preach with your finger tsking lately, out with your dimple!

Easily done, my life dissected

Is anything so simple?

Youngest daughter of six, oft rejected,

Born to a loud home in the South.

Now twenty-two, enjoying a quiet life

Amid piles of books and wine down my mouth,

Too quiet, clock ticking and causing strife

Time spent waiting, waiting…for what?

Knocks filled with promise, husband, praise from readers-but!

I am impatient, stubborn, varied

I only wait so long my friend, to be carried

To the future, the future to which I belong

Where my dreams will come true, come strong

This is where you come in, dear facilitator,

My empty ticking classroom and life needs a rehabilitator.

Someone to answer the questions, why why why,

To let me live my dreamed life, and finally to die.”

I am the only one being fake candid-did I ruin the photo?

R.J. Proffer

I'm only Becky on the weekends

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