January 2014
Notes From The Classroom
The Students Part III. Tolu
by Phyllis Capello
Wiry girl in yesterday’s dress,
dirty-hair-smell; across her cheeks:
unlikely scars (little nick spots,
pink against mahogany skin).
Did someone go at it
with something sharp?
Not charmed by my
red-lipstick smile, my perfume,
my silky clothes;
she wriggled in her chair,
went from sourpuss to sneer,
when I came near.
Tolu wrote me another poem today!
How many lifetimes
is she up to,
I wonder, at seven?
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.