A Generational Portrait as Skipping Class in America by Mia Nelson

yes, there is a difference between record and revel
and I’ve always been comfortable with
one & not the other. Some animals wait
out their whole lives belly down in sweet grass
hoping it doesn’t rain. In north carolina
this week, a man won the lottery with
numbers from his fortune cookie & I
want everything to work that way––
I’ve always believed in the God that gives
and if I were one, I’d never make anyone fight for anything
either. Meaning, everything is a sign. Like the day
our state’s football team won the superbowl
and the mayor gave excused absences to every public school
kid in Denver. When a day like that falls in your lap,
you gotta run the numbers. It’s blasphemy
to not start the car engine and drive to that
horizon of people, dressed in orange like
our very own midday sunset. Audrey
used to tape calculus notes to her ceiling,
so even in sleep she could count incalculable
things. Unfathomable now, but there was an everyday
where I made bouquets of black inked notes instead
of eating and hoped I didn’t fall asleep driving
hair-soaked back from swim team after three hours
of half-drowning the sweat of school and other people’s
spit from me. A lot of living that felt like watching
because I didn’t want to be there. It’s almost always easier
to be made of eyes instead of hands & that’s the one thing
I know I am not alone in. We are all still standing ankle
deep in some midnight colored water catching a chill
because its the way it always is. I think we might as
well call it dystopian every time a fifteen year old rolls
her eyes at a bomb threat or sends I love you just in case
because that is the kind of break from school we’d usually
get. An interesting thing about Colorado is somedays a woman
tweets about making another Columbine and other days we
win the superbowl. Have you ever you called a life a life
until you lose it? Until then it's just a long blue thread to
some imaginary almost-summer day when you can just breathe.
Sometimes, I close my eyes and will my body to forget everything
that doesn’t want me to live & I skip class over and over again.