I Watch Her Poem by Elizabeth Jordan Heinbuch

I watch her
Cram herself against the front board
In stiff strangled movements
A chalk-covered cadaver
This- her posture
Elbows elevated- angled
A perfect precise 90 degrees
Spine straightened strung taught and tight
Unmoving-
Catatonic awkwardness.
Fingers firmly formed
around pink sticks of dust
Dissolving into Ashes
Blush(Like the color absent from her cheeks)
She scrawls short,
Uneven, unlevel lines
Unparallel. Unplanned.
Her jaw moves
-eating the air-
With her words
Confusing sentences
In jumbles and jargon
Roll off of her tongue
As her teeth click in foreign languages
Unfamiliar to me.
Stories of modern romanticism
Storm through our ears
Dulled by boredom and fear
(Most likely of enlightenment)
Attatched to our past
Our previous preconceptions.
Unstable in all of our understandings
All of our learnings
lean and lay collapsed beneath us.
She wears clothes
at the front of the classroom
like a professor- a professional
In a tailored suit
which really doesn't suit her.
Her bland beige heels
converse with the tile floor
As she stomps
in her variant version of stilhettos
On the catwalk by the chalkboard
Seemingly a stage
For her type of timid beauty
Beaten into submission- seclusion
Hiding her face-
Facing the blackboard.