I used to spend long, long minutes
standing very still in my parents' house,
deep in the blue of the formal dining room,
after laying out all the silverware, cut-glass decanters
and drinking vessels. I would hold each spoon
to catch the reflection of my eye. I tipped each metal arc
till it gleamed off my skin. Sometimes I'd pretend
I was the doctor I planned to be, and held a thin plate
low to see what I would look like to my patients,
who would, after all, be seeing me from below.
Years later, teaching kindergarten, I was told always to
speak to children at eye-level, so they weren't peering
up at my chin and foreshortened Mount Rushmore
face. At nine, however, yearning for something
I didn't know how to name, I spoke consoling words
to the empty bowl, raising my eyebrows, efficiently
tucking imaginary sheets into white hospital corners,
telling nobody that I could fix whatever ailed them
and that everything was going to be all right.
_____________________________________________________________________________

On the Teaching of Writing, that Dangerous Art
By Elizabeth H. Barbato

I work best with those who are profoundly curious about themselves, about their assumptions…and the demands of perspective.
--Lucinda Roy

My colleagues in the English office
have names like Griffin, Huber, Mahoney,
and Rollenhagen, Riegelman, Blackburn.
Hers have names like Bean and Allnutt, Voros and Bloomer.
They grin or scowl in the thumbnail photos
on the Virginia Tech Creative Writing webpage.
Her students have names in newsprint, like Cho.
My chest curves in on itself like an elephant tusk
heavy with memory, arc of shattered time.

Wasn't it his creative writing teacher who first pegged him
asks my friend, who sits to my back in this office
where children are welcome and are noisy,
where lilacs call us outside in spring evenings,
saying stop working, enough with the words,
where prayer flags from Tibet hang, where wasps too lazy
even to sting trace holding patterns near the ceiling.
This is where, my students say, my books
continually threaten to defeat their shelving
and bury me once and for all—not even a lone leg twitching—
Kafka bug dream death: under poems, no apples.

I consider Cho. I worry him
like a terrier, like a tongue against the groove
of molar root, like a rag doll, like a voodoo doll.
Pins for eyes. Real bone. Hair in clumps.
The sound of slow moans.
A popping in aural darkness. Running feet,
the number 33, Columbine, clock towers,
and flashing lights that don't mean a thing.
We are not safe we are not safe we are not safe
careens through my head before I can stop it.
I want to open my arms and hold you.
I want you to see your reflections in so many bowls,
so many buckets of water holding your own struggles,
so many tidal changes that will try to rip you limb from limb:
I want you to go away and never, never, never be afraid.
I want you to polish yourselves with love until you gleam.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Richard III
By Elizabeth H. Barbato

Cold child that walks the streets in the hour before dawn,
when barking dogs call out your name to unhearing ears:
your nightmare mother cursed you out of mind,
and you danced, how you danced, to show her
the true mirror-shape of your national compassion,
you who understood the reeking limbs of power,
that they cannot halt the waltz, not even for drowsy
little faces fresh in innocent sleep. You smothered
the last gasp of your line, and played the dark field
until, crying in unformed, unloved, selfish
abandon for a way out, you limped off
under cover of toadstools. Black, tired heart.

There is no exegesis of your dismemberment,
only the reformation of a great house, blood
wedded to blood, pale Elizabeth. Stones mortared
with lecherous thoughts are torn askew;
the locks are changed for the tombs in the Tower,
and York, bled dry, haunts the cobblestones
all grim-visaged and halting, alone
once more in this parched and breathless world.

Elizabeth H. Barbato is an English teacher born and raised through her college years in New England. She ended up in New Jersey, where for fourteen years she's taught writing, drama and music to every age from kindergarteners to high school seniors. She's spent the past several summers finishing her doctorate, fishing in VT, and going to northern Scotland to check out the Picts (there aren't any left). This summer she's sailing to the Galapagos to investigate the Darwin/Vonnegut connection. She has pieces in current or forthcoming editions of Apple Valley Review, Poetrybay, The Litchfield Review, Foliate Oak, Stride, and SOFTBLOW.