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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of cc&d magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

poem by Laura E. Bontrager

what I am learning

about language
and the world.

the words,
I know they are supposed
to be teaching me --
history, honor, mistakes,
morals and math. compassion
and current events.
but no,
language is a barricade.
it is bricking us all
inside ourselves.

how I learned it:
a news story about
overseas darkness. tragedy
in solemn dark eyes:
the women raped in africa.

a woman hiding under her bed, one
tied up by her sobbing son, another
discarded by a war-weary husband.
this woman
not crying, not ashamed, not
anything other than honest.
only when I saw her I heard
the alien isolation
of her language, not
the woman.
it was a wall. it kept me
deaf.

until
the woman,
this woman mouthing in stone-smooth
unknowable tongue, her lips
giving out sounds, outside even
her own self and so
outside me--

she raised her arm.
and it
dangled
from her elbow, dangled
her broken wrist, her broken
hand, her curled up
broken fingers.
the bone like an ashy
ouble-jointed trick only
broken.
her two mourning bones,
separated and longing for the other,
still sheathed in skin but
unable to keep it quiet--
her bones shouting,
demolishing the silent distance.

high school english never held
knowledge like this. only

I see no students. no one
here willing to learn.

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