Cloister

Some days, this classroom reminds me of a temple.
Pink post-it notes dapple the landscape: unexpected cherry blossoms
with vocabulary terms like harbinger
and solace written in pre-adolescent scrawl.
At least once every period, a student knocks a hydro flask
off their desk. When it hits the ground like a struck gong,
like a body, my heart races and suddenly alarmed,
I can feel how alive I am, how badly my body wants to
protect me from danger. A boy with earbuds slumps
into his chair, pulls a red hoodie over his head,
a monk readying himself in prayer, leaning defiance
into his computer screen. I think of the Korean nuns
who wander the grounds of mountaintop monasteries,
hunched over, spines riddled with scoliosis,
hands forming knots behind their backs.
Reverence can be hard to recognize.
Sometimes it looks like the weary, determined body
bending into the next hour, the arc of one’s instinct.
In an active shooter drill, we pull the shades to make us
invisible, in case the perpetrator climbs onto the roof
and tries to kill us by firing through the windows.
Students huddle on the floor in the corner furthest
from the door, knees drawn up against their chests.
Their eyes shine in the sudden darkness.
Two boys toss a bottle cap between them and it clinks,
echoes into the hallway beneath the locked door.
A group of children unafraid is called a cloister.
I cast dirty looks in their direction as if to say
if this was real you’d be dead by now.

Joan Kwon Glass is author of How to Make Pancakes For a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) & If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). She is Poetry Co-Editor for West Trestle Review & her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Diode, Rattle, Pirene’s Fountain, South Florida Poetry Journal, Kissing Dynamite, Lumiere Review, trampset, Rust & Moth, Mom Egg, SWWIM, Honey Literary, Lantern Review, Barnstorm & others. Since 2018, Joan has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She tweets @joanpglass & you may read her previously published work at www.joankwonglass.com.