Grade School Desks
In grade school we were the first class
to be given new desks. Real desks, not the kind
with the lift up top, but ones with compartments
on the left side. One small one on top for our
cigar box of pencils and pens, our ink and lead
erasers. The lower compartment held
our books and Red Chief tablets, our half finished
worksheets. The girls kept their desks neat
like a mother might keep a house, a few boys
did the same. They were the better students,
well-behaved, the school’s good citizens.
Some of us were amazingly sloppy, our desks
flowing over like closets and loaded garages.
One boy’s desk spilled out across the floor,
a semi-circle of papers and text books, scrawled
drawings of fast cars and airplanes, some
penciled in terrible crashes with flames, crushed
fenders and clipped wings. When told to clean
his work area, he’d spend the next minute
stuffing his desk with fistfuls of wreckage.
Meadowlark
If we hit a baseball into the old man’s garden
that was pretty much it for the ball. No one
had the guts to crawl into his tomatoes, reaching
through the stakes between the furrows.
The old man worked his garden each morning,
mulching the cucumbers and melons, chopping
his hoe around the sweet corn. He never spoke
to us in the vacant lot, not even to those
with neighborhood talent. Our baseballs disappeared
into his overall pockets. That was that.
He mopped his face with the bandana of our game.
If a batter really laid the wood to the ball,
we’d shout to the outfield to hurry before it rolled
into the squash or snapped the green beans.
We imagined the old man hated us, until one
afternoon his lawn mower shot a wire across the lot
into Stevie Miller’s stomach. It laid Stevie open
like an appendectomy. The old man
ran to his side, and pressed his bandana into
Stevie’s blood. The first time we heard his voice
it quivered like a meadowlark’s quivers.
Al Ortolani is a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. His poems have appeared in Rattle, One Art, and the Pithead Chapel. New York Quarterly Books plans to release his most recent poetry collection, American Watercolor, in early 2027.
January House Literary Journal 
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