I will never forget the first day of freshman English,when my teacher mentioned she was vegetarianand a pimpled boy in an orange-billed Giants cap asked whyin the way only teenagers do—ingenuine and genuineat the same time—and the teacher paused, considering,on the brink of some cliff I couldn’t see, before she explained,matter-of-factly, under the pulsating fluorescent lights,how her older brother’s friend raped her when she wasour age, and the next day, as she watched her motherprepare a chicken for dinner, she felt exactly like the deadbird—fridge cold and raw—and as her motherseparated thigh from breast, our teacher decidedshe would never eat meat again. As you might expect,a roomful of fourteen-year-olds did not know howto respond, could only open and close their mouths like goldfishin fishbowls, the kind who seem to only…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, July/August 2023