Death is a genius—
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still a child and already so sharp, her tongue a glass knife that could cut bone. She fits right in with
our gifted program. Unlike the other precocious children in her class, however, we’ve noticed Death
doesn’t seem interested in playing the games we set out for indoor recess. Last week the teachers
encouraged her to join some of the others playing Connect 4. She swallowed the pieces whole. Then
the board. We had to send her to the nurse’s office. Not for her sake— she was entirely fine—, but
because the incident, well, it rather freaked out the other students. Death is a unique child, who
comes with unique challenges, and I want you as her mother to rest assured that we’re committed to
meeting those challenges. It’s actually your other child I’m worried about. Candidly, Beauty is a
terror. Yesterday she grabbed Death’s tongue out of her mouth, squeezed it viciously. It seemed to
be some kind of power display. Beauty’s blood all over the classroom, Death’s tongue in Beauty’s
mangled hands. We sent them both to the nurse’s office. Death herself was fine, but Beauty needed
her help walking downstairs without traipsing all that blood behind her. I’m not sure, frankly, that
there’s a place for Beauty at this school.
Sophia Bannister’s poems have most recently been published in Hole in the Head Review. She teaches and lives in New York.
This poem was selected by January poetry curator Alan Shapiro. He writes: “One of the responsibilities of poetry is to make room for what remains stubbornly unpoetic. The speaker of this weird and wonderful poem is a guidance counselor or school principal or director of a program for gifted children. The traditional use of personification, even allegory, is doubly transformed by the pitch perfect idiom of a professionally earnest bureaucrat.”
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