Miss Jackson and the Plastic Vagina

Miss Jackson and the Plastic Vagina

I.
There were waivers passed around in early
spring, in anticipation of the last
chapter in our sexual educat-
-ion, that first year of high school, in a brick,
renovated building deemed “not enough,
only up to date but not state of the
art,” by my father, when baggy pants and
hockey jerseys were still very much in
vogue, and braces plagued the adolescent
mouths of a grand number of us.

II.
Both my
responsible parents dutifully
signed it, and I was ignorant to the
fact that it was, in fact, a parental
right to refuse.  Upon that discove-
-ry, I remember thinking about the
outrage with which I would have greeted the
news that my mother and father were to
deprive me of the chance to hear about
breasts and intercourse, and all these other
things which were to fill my sordid,
acne-ridden head.

III.
Ms. Jackson, about
my mother’s age, greeted us all (minus
one, whose parents exercised their rights), and
set the new ground rules for engaging the
materials covered in the next few
chapters in our textbook (and here I have
to believe that she knew we read ahead).

IV.
The reading, however, was not memor-
-able, not satisfying my puerile
need for visuals.  Although, there was an
afternoon in which we suffocated
a banana with premium latex
condoms (I thought the packaging looked a
bit goofy), all of us taking our turns
after Ms. Jackson demonstrated the
proper technique (“Get the air bubbles out,”
she said, rolling it down towards the stem, a
reminder that I would receive a year
and a half later in the bed of some-
-one else after school, before I went to
work at the pharmacy), before we ran
to the bathroom, giggling, to wash the
smell of spermicide off.

V.
No one could have
foreseen the complications involved when
out of her bag, Ms. Jackson produced the
plastic vagina.  Gender mattered not
as she placed the beige body part on the
beige desktop:  we were all in a state of
utter disbelief, with an esteemed class-
-mate Nate emitting a hushed “Holy shit.”
Class proceeded, but our fresh teenage eyes
seldom diverged from the unexpected
guest.

VI.
As Ms. Jackson began detailing
the names of all the various regions
contained within this as yet unexplored
region of the female sex (both in the
classroom and the field), her fingers ventured
inside, I suppose as a way to catch
our attention and demonstrate its depth.
It seems, though, that this action, smacked not of
prudence, as when she attempted to ex-
-tract her hand from someone’s replica,
she found herself unable.

VII.
As students,
this was fast becoming a bit too much
for one period’s worth of awkward dis-
-comfort; true, some did laugh, but most of us
stared without offensive intent, simply
coming to terms with the fact that our ninth
grade health teacher had gotten her hand lodged
uncomfortably, unintentionally,
and apparently quite securely in-
-side a plastic vagina about which
we had absolutely no forewarning,
and trying to retrace how exactly
we got here, and what we’d be doing if
our parents had never signed that waiver.

VIII.
Too young to analyze what this situ-
-ation meant for the long term student-and-
-teacher dynamics of authority
and power, we silently complied as
she dismissed the class, waiting until we
were at the other end of the hall to
begin our laughter, that slow, rising song
of puberty-plagued guffaws, done before
the ringing of the sixth period bell.

The Earthworms’ Rainy Springtime Deaths

The Earthworms’ Rainy Springtime Deaths

I.
In the Aprils showers that in Vermont
have extended to May, I see them on
morning runs, vying for dirt, slithering
with mixed purpose on the pavement, most of
them alive, but some are either squished or
severed in half.  I do try, honestly
I do, to avoid them, but I’m sure my
shoes, unintentional accessories
to the crime, have felled a few.  They are pink
and brown and sometimes a somewhat reddish
gray, all of them soaked as I loop back to
my apartment, the converted funer-
-al home.  Days later, sometimes, if the rain
lets up, they will be there, dehydrated
versions of their former selves, stuck to the
sidewalk, accidental, anorexic
peppers, or, if there is no reprieve from
the rain, they fall victim to cars or bikes
or passers by, before bloating signi-
-ficantly to a quite unpleasant end.

II.
And I think back to seventh grade science,
taught by a strange woman who did yoga
and talked about peeing on plants somewhere
in India (“It’s good for them!” she then
explained to a gawking class), as we learned
about the earthworm, we were all in a
state of disbelief when we discovered
that they could not regrow if they were cut
in half, given that we had just witnessed
something like that happen with another
animal (brown, slimy, lived in water)
in our petri dishes two weeks before.
We listened as Miss Develeskis told
us why, during rainfall, they tended to
surface, citing moisture, oxygen, and
other elements, I’m sure, then noting,
with little sign of remorse, that these side-
-walk adventures and pavement promenades,
owing to the way they breathe, resulted
with near certainty in their untimely
demise, their surfacing merely a short
purchase on life, driven from the under-
-world up into the less amenable
conditions of our own existence.  “So
the earthworms are basically committing
suicide, then?” asked a classmate and friend.
Miss Develeskis chewed on the question
for a bit, before replying:  “I guess
you could say that, yes.”  We stared back at her.

III.
Then it happened that I was a student
down the street, in a renovated high
school that opened late upon my entry,
when, once in my second year and once in
my third, I learned from classmates the news that,
in the springtimes consumed by tests, and sports
and part-time jobs, in our small, safe town com-
-posed of small, safe families, two earthworms
in the form of young men my age had, as
green lawns came back to life and the daylight
extended past the afternoon, as a
result of the raindrops of school bus taunts
and unrequited love, and of the weight
of the Baptist Church, and having to leave
student government and soccer behind
(respectively), climbed above the soil
of their daily grind, and out the windows
of their bedrooms, to be recovered at
a later time by their own species, up-
-on returning home from work, shocked at the
spectacle that they were forced to behold.