Phosphor
In a classroom we hold up sheets of music.
We chant in Latin with changing voices.
Because she thinks I am the gentlest
Sister Angela picks me out.
When I can’t get the right tone or pitch
she puts her face to my face, “Sing! Sing!”
The wen on her cheek quivers on a skin
so white it almost seems like phosphorous.
I know she’ll hit me in a second
but nothing will make me sing now.
It is during moments such as this
that one makes promises to oneself.
I place my hand on the flat of anger’s blade
and tell myself I will never again
accept another’s violence.
When she banishes me to homeroom forever
I read Newsweeks in the classroom next door
and trace on folding-maps those black arrows
where the marines were landing at Inchon.
In daydreams of that war I did not think
of the white fragments glowing, stuck to skin.
But I thought again and again of Angela,
of her metallic skin infused with heat
glowing in my mind like phosphor, or Lucifer,
the morning star erased by a rising sun.
Glover Davis
from Separate Lives, Pecan Grove Press, 2007
