The Unicorn

For Jose

When I was young,
I loved unicorns.
Those horns contained magic:
the power to render poisoned water potable
and to heal sickness.
I collected them~
a stuffed one from our local dime store,
so large it took up my bed.
My Little Pony had an array
of purple and pink
unicorns to collect.
I lost my unicorns years later
when my mother lost her foot to diabetes,
chopped off from infection,
Julie decided to
dump talismans I held dear
from our childhood home.
We lose things,
but new things come in.
A student in a wheelchair
is hesitant to use the assistive technology,
which sits on his head
so he can type what is on his mind
to the computer screen.
A unicorn among horses,
he does not want to stand out.
How can I convince him of the truth
of Mandela’s words,
“Even in prison
a man can be quite free.”
We are not limited to this
physical form.
When Lara was killed in a car accident,
our family changed forever.
Two horns down to one~
her mortal coil shuffled off while mine still spun.
Let us support you,
my unicorn,
for we all have horns
which seem out of place,
but which hold magic,
holding space for the next step here on earth.

Cracker

Isaiah asked, “What is that bag on your desk?”
I replied, “My lunch.”
“Can I have one of your assorted crackers?”
In Elizabethan times, “cracker”
described braggarts.
Are you a facebook braggart???
The root of the Middle English “crack”
means “entertaining conversation.”
I told Isaiah I was not his mother.
In his speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X remarked,
"It's time for you and me to stop sitting in this country,
letting some cracker senators, Northern crackers and Southern crackers,
sit there in Washington, D.C., and come to a conclusion in their mind
that you and I are supposed to have civil rights.
There's no white man going to tell me anything about my rights."
Pejorative connotation?
I didn’t know what a cracker was in high school
until my best friend told me I was a cracker
and he was a spic.
Raymond Carver wrote Soda Cracker, an ode to teach.
I brought Isaiah
a bag of crackers to eat at his own risk.
My mother used to feed me stale crackers~
I feed my students etymology,
hoping they will digest
the ambiguities, complexities, and nuances of vocabulary,
my satire,
in context.