the stakes (september)

Here I am again. So many of that sentence, though, are changeable things: for I and Here are never ever anything again. At least I hope that's true, because this is my second year as a teacher & there are so many things I want to do differently! There is a kind of confidence I didn't feel last September, but it's difficult to hold onto alone in this quiet room, so different from the space I'll inhabit for the next nine months. The closest I come to knowing who I am for real is when I am in front of with these kids, which is also the closest I come to forgetting myself entirely.

School starts tomorrow. For most of my students, this is a good thing. These are children for whom "summer" does not mean camp & lazy days, but hot tempers & dangerous hungers & nowhere to go. Summer means accidents, & tragedy. This weekend, an incoming freshman on the swim team - one of the "good" kids - was shot in the neck & will be, at best, paralyzed. These are the stakes. & yet how can they be, when they are also that absolute absence of stakes, that space beyond my control, those 16 other hours in the day when I cannot save them. Being a teacher is so much about control. Having it, & knowing where you do not have it, letting that go.

At some point I realized that I can't save them. That is, I cannot swoop down like a terrible angel & save them from this traumatic, ugly thief of a world. I can only create a space for critical thinking & dialogue & love & engagement - a space of beauty & radical possibility - in which they become capable of saving themselves. I cannot date this realization because it is something I have to remind myself again & again.

Today, for instance. I have to, because tomorrow 150 other children will be clambering into my heart all desperately in need of saving.
________


P.S. I hope to allow myself more time this year to write here regularly, so keep in touch.

beasts spitting fire

THIS is the part of the job that brings me joy.



video from the first part of our poetry club performance at the orr talent show friday. unfortunately i don't have video of our second group of kids, who also ROCKED.

poets in this order: Ms. Temeltas, Gregory Dobbs, Markytha Davis, & Kayla Branch

p.s. thank you shugs for filming & for being there.

Hunger.

by Margeaux Temeltas

Chicago, October 2008
Dedicated to the 300

hunger spits on poetry

living as it does in the gut of the world,
in the gut of the world’s forgotten,
an ache that gnaws on displaced dreams,
howling, huge and empty,
eating everything _____ but itself.

hunger binds the blind and the forgotten
hunger thrives on blindness,
as in a blackly yawning alleyway
cracked streetlights glitter like a crooked grin,
lonesome for beauty.

only the blind see __an empty alley.

look._____________ inside empty,
hunger is a small boy crouched,
useless as a diamond,
his inconsolable bones digging into the moon.

for, yes— _________ even the hungry can see the moon.

that’s the oilslick glint in his inkblack eyes,
the light shivering now as the boy
gathers the dust of his hunger
into words, _________where,
discovered on a page,
hunger becomes beautiful.

because hunger?
hunger spits poetry.

_______________


from a prompt during after-school poetry club,
to be performed Friday, April 17th, 2009
at the Orr Academy High School Talent Show

Photo by Margeaux Temeltas
Midwinter Swimming Pool, Pulaski Park
Chicago 2008