Enlisting
Every list came to school:
milk, dimes, savings bonds.
On the teacher's desk
sat the bathroom list,
the fountain list.
They'd squeal on you;
they'd tell Miss Hartung
you were smoking or carving
filth into a wall.
There was a list in the air
that beat up sissies,
that circled Harold Martin
and signed him up
for a second tour
while the list for teams
chased us across a field,
yelled from the bleachers,
stood by the sidelines
in a gang. We shrank
inside our uniforms,
hit and curled, air
nowhere near our lungs.
Not then. And not while
those lists were posted,
the ones that flew us
to Asia, the third
of seven continents
on a list we copied
from Harold Martin,
who stopped reporting us
after he read our list
all over his unprotected,
third-world body.
Structure
33 lines · 1 stanza