School Year

School Year

(With help from Alice Walker's story, "The Flowers")

Melissa Rude

I stepped smack into a landmine:
large white teeth,
thirty naked grins
cracking wide open at once.

Year wears on,
bouncing this way and that,
carrying me on its wave:
frayed, bleached, and frazzled.

Tenaciously, I hang on.
Year fades into lazy days of
whims and warm sunshine:
desperate relaxation.

Then one day too soon
the summer was over
and once again,
I step smack into a landmine.