Caitlin McDonnell
Nikki’s Question
Would you do that for us, Ms. Caitlin,
asked Nikki, young dark brown eyes
lit as amber sap, lidded with gold shadow
like the end of a day. She was referring
to Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis’s act
of heroism, standing her 27-year-old body
between her young students
and the gunman. My students practiced
hiding in lockers that day at lunch,
laughing and flirting, pretending not
to open the door. Nikki, the first
in her family to be facing tenth-grade
without another life brewing inside her,
had asked me other pressing questions.
Would you send your daughter
to this school? My white skin thick
with rebuttal. It’s not our zone,
I told her, and she nodded, uh, huh.
And why should she trust adults
who drink cheap wine at night
to forget her world enough to sleep?
Why you always listen to this sad girl music?
Nikki asked me once, as I swept
the classroom floor, littered with
passed notes and undone worksheets
about the books only two of them
would read. Cat Power crackled
Losing the star without a sky
Losing the reasons why
Nikki, you were one step ahead of me.
I don’t know what I’d have done;
my own daughter looming like
an exotic flower. I do know
your question will carry you miles,
hang in the air like a body itself,
heart beating its own time.
Caitlin Grace McDonnell is the author of Dreaming the Tree (Belladonna Books, 2003) and Looking for Small Animals (Nauset Press 2012). Her poems, essays and book reviews have appeared in Salon, Washington Square, Chronogram, and other journals. As a high school student in Boulder, she took classes at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, later moving to New York where she attended Bard College and studied with John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach. Caitlin won a grant to study at the Poet’s House in Ireland and was a New York Times Poetry Fellow at NYU where she received her MFA. She is an English teacher in Brooklyn where she lives with her daughter.
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