Dear Student Athletic Director
Summer 2020
Re: droplets. How long does each one hang, or how far
does it risk propelling itself before it dissolves in midair
or into strands of hair whipping into a mouth with 200,000,000
droplets tagging along, exerting their legacy, ecstatic grip
before dissolving midair, or latching onto anything, strands
of hair, lips, eyes, someone’s daughter on Whitecap Beach,
her face wide open with determination, body bent forward
following direction. Re: student training. Asking for clarification.
Re: the Instagram video of the women’s soccer team
on Whitecap Beach, showing the girls packed in, pushing
hurdles through the sand for practice, side by side, no face
coverings, no six-feet distance per CDC and NCAA, wild-eyed
coaches drilling from the dunes; rows of their faces, pushing
their breath into gulf air. Re: droplets. How far does each
one expel its commerce of breath, its wild trade among
millions of droplets whipping into a mouth or lingering.
Out of Line
i.
When you’re a lone voice in a rafter of academics,
even after the Dean grunts
at you in the hallway, when you make his life
difficult when you speak up
for the voiceless, when lives are at stake
and you can’t sleep
if they are cold.
ii.
when he says in a private meeting you deserve fairness, but he can’t make waves with the CEO, with the Vice CEO, with the Assistant to the Associate of the Vice CEO, and he’d deny he ever said this, as he’d deny asking if students ever write about flowers instead of discharging bitter polemics
iii.
when you hear the pastoral theory of poetry in his head and observe him try to reconcile it with modernity, while he tells you he will deny saying it and he trusts you.
iv.
when this echoes your father
retired from corporate America,
Vietnam and kidney cancer,
who trusted you when he said
religion was made by men to control women
and if you ever told your mother
or anyone, he’d deny it.
iv.
when the med-tech staff sergeant in the Pediatric Clinic Supply Closet pushes you and your starched senior airman skirt up against the cabinets and says he’d deny this and you should deny this impossible-to-get-out-of-intact-or-without-some-kind-of-bruising-situation no matter what you did and you should deny every other impossible to get out of intact or without bruising situation in other closets, in a boat out in a Lake in Riverside with an old man chasing you around leeward and windward, at a castle garden bench in Lakenheath, in a laundry room, at a brick wall outside a nightclub, at an office party beer gag, in a wide-open living room while someone’s wife still at work
v.
when you are still swinging
your camera off your hips
for the historic and glorious
shores of the Mediterranean Sea
three stooges off base
gang up on you beneath the hills
which become the sentinels who echo
your no across the valley and village
who crack a space through the trees,
a caesura big enough in his tank
on top of you for you to slip from the panting
chase through the woods in which you are
vi.
always the hunted through the highways and byways
amid men and their wives, homes, and offices
who would rather bury you
vii
even in this institution of grace,
pedigree, science, and spectacle,
children playing in the sandbox
where you’ve raced since a child
to the commands, avoiding the brick
hands at your slightest indiscretions
because your survival has rested on yes
sirs and yes ma’ams, how may I help you,
viii.
where you’ve furrowed the fields,
packed them down and plowed on,
when you’ve made your body grow
to pull it all until your limbs swell
and strain your voice
into a treacle of whispers,
ix.
then lurches
unscholarly, erupts,
dislodges a loose irreverent cannon
blasting from the top balcony,
you can rest
assured that everyone knows
you’re the outsider, agitating
crone, cunt, curse
of a woman who needs some
wide berth because she’s lost it,
so vocal and fallen
completely
out of line.
Robin Carstensen
Robin is Switchgrass Review Co-founder and Senior Editor. Her chapbook, In the Temple of Shining Mercy, is the recipient of an annual first-place award by Iron Horse Literary Press and was published in 2017. Poems also appear in BorderSenses, Southern Humanities Review, Voices de La Luna, Demeter Press’s anthology, Borderlands, and Crossroads: Writing the Motherland, and many more. She directs the creative writing program at Texas A&M University-CC where she also advises The Windward Review: a literary journal of the South Texas Coastal Bend.