January 2014
Notes From The Classroom
The Students Part I. Third Period, English
by Phyllis Capello
Silent, amid giddy student-noise, Brian
narrows his eyes in the too-bright classroom;
a chalky mask veils his dark Indian skin;
immovable grief diminishes his thin frame.
(The air, turned to stone, pressing in
to enter the bone.)
“Bad news,” he whispers to a place
between people, “this morning,
the phone, my cousin,
her blood–too–thin,
gone,” he says, “twelve.”
Rising in his swollen throat
through red lips gone gray,
a quivering, like a hummingbird’s
fluttering heart; “Maria!”
he names her: cousin,
companion, abandoner.
About Phyllis Capello
Phyllis Capello is published in: The Dream Book, From the Margin, The Voices We Carry, Don’t Tell Mama, The Milk of Almonds, Creative Nonfiction, Reading, Writing and Reacting, The New York Quarterly, The Wind in Our Sails, The Little Magazine, Legendaria, The Paterson Literary Review, and Literary Mama. A NYFA fellow in Fiction, a prizewinner in The Allen Ginsberg Poetry contest, her program On the Breath, about Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, was presented at the International Oral History Conference in Rome.