Читать книгу Magic City Gospel - Ashley M. Jones - Страница 12

TEACHING J TO READ

I don’t know how to begin,

how to explain that A means A,

that B isn’t Beaver

but simply B,

the second drawing

in a series of twenty-six.

He is in the fifth grade

and he can’t read about Dick or Jane.

He spends his days

finding new places to hide—

in between book chapters, scraping ink;

at the end of a punchline;

on the lip of a carton of milk.

I am useless, like an after-school special—

here, there is no purple dinosaur,

no sparkle in our smiles,

no bell-toned music to montage this away.

He finds pig in big

and the way a fist can solve these things.

He loses his name

in the sprawling alphabet—

the surest letter is the first: J.

This is the dark curve

that marks him,

and, even now,

I can’t remember the letters

that follow.