Wendy Barker

I Hate Telling People I Teach English

Like last August, after they’d finished my bone scan,

this combed-over mid-sixties guy starts chatting about the novel

he’s written in his head, he only needs someone like me

to work it up, he never liked punctuation, parts of speech, all that junk

from junior high, and I couldn’t get my print-out fast enough

to take to my GP, who likes to quote from his inspirational speeches

to local luncheon clubs. He’s determined to collect them

in a book, though he’d need a good editor, do I know any, and meanwhile

I’ve been waiting fifty-seven minutes for help with recharging

my sluggish thyroid, and I haven’t met any doctors who like giving

free advice about your daughter’s milk allergy or your friend’s

migraines or the thumb you slammed in the stairwell door, splitting it

open so badly your students interrupted your lecture on

pronoun agreement to note you were dripping blood from your hand

and wow, what happened? But it’s mostly at parties I hate

admitting I teach English. I’ve never been quick enough to fudge,

the way a Methodist minister friend says he’s in “support

services” so he doesn’t get called to lead grace. I guess I could dub myself

a “communications facilitator,” but since I’m in the business

of trying to obviate obfuscation, I own up, though I dread what I know

is coming: Oh, they say, I hated English, all that grammar,

you won’t like the way I talk, you’ll be correcting me, and suddenly

they need another Bud or merlot or they’ve got to check out

the meatballs or guacamole over on the table and I’m left facing

blank space, no one who can even think about correcting

my dangling participles. Once when the computer guy was at the house,

bent over my laptop trying to get us back online,

he asked what it was I wrote, and when I told him “poetry,” said, “Ah—

fluffy stuff,” and I wasn’t sure whether he was kidding

or not, but I figured at least it was better than his saying he hated poetry

or that he had a manuscript right outside in his Camry and

could I take a look, no hurry, but he knew it would sell, could I tell him

how to get an agent for his novel about his uncle

moving to Arizona and running a thriving ostrich farm until the day

hot-air balloons took off a half mile away

and stampeded the birds, till all he was left with were feathers and bloody

tangled necks on fence posts, the dream of making two million

from those birds a haunting sentence fragment—but then, I think:

I would never have wanted to miss the time a dentist,

tapping my molars, asked if I’d like to hear him recite Chaucer’s Prologue

to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, which he did

while I lay back in his chair, open-mouthed, pierced to the root.

Poem originally published in The Southern Review.