Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

I Find My Love: In Mr. Fletcher’s School  
Laura Madeline Wiseman

Durand, Illinois, 1850s-1860s

At my desk, my neck near the heat
of the coal stove, I tried to make sense
of arithmetic, tried to make it all add up.
x (grades in class) ≥ y (his grasp of my arm when I slipped on ice)

When it snowed, Mr. John Fletcher walked with me
home to carry a volume of grammar
to my sick brother, Geo, eager to know
1 (his elocution) ± 1 (his stories of England) ≤ t (his lips as he spoke)

what the new instructor might teach.
Mr. Fletcher stayed for supper, spoke soft
with mother and shook father’s hand.
z (his eyes as we ate) + z (father’s laugh) = z (mother’s open invitation)ⁿ

In class, the youngest failed penmanship.
Mr. Fletcher never scolded, never paddled
with the board, never used the strap, never
1 (my self-consciousness) = 1 (his fingers on chalk) × 1 (his body before us)

asked us to open our palms for the ruler.
He punished by oration. Some older girls
and boys purposely forgot their lesson
1 (his scent as we washed for lunch) ≠ 0 (a lack of hunger)

to be required to recite while he watched
and listened to the precision of their tongue
in the center of the one-room schoolhouse.
2 (his hands in his pockets) ÷ 2 (his pockets) = 1 (my full body blush)

So was it no surprise that when he called on me
I forgot my words? He asked me to learn
Winter Beauty by Henry Ward Beecher.
1842 (my birth year) - 1837 (his birth year) = 5 (years between us)

I nodded, the sermon already in my mouth
my head, my ears, my body even. I knew
how to perform the minister’s pulpit antics.
w (the distance to the blackboard)ⁿ - 1  = w (the distance to the future)ⁿ + 1

For years I had purloined the Readers
from my older siblings to practice oration.
He never knew I already knew those words.
my (poems + lectures) = my (dreams + goals) = ∞

Laura Madeline Wiseman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she teaches English. She is the author of three chapbooks, My Imaginary (Dancing Girl Press, 2010), Ghost Girl (Pudding House, 2010), and Branding Girls, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her writing has appeared in Margie, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Blackbird, Arts & Letters, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.  She has received numerous awards and honors including an Academy of American Poets Award, the Mari Sandoz fiction Award, and the Stuff Memorial Fellowship, and grants from the Center for Great Plains Studies and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.