Sample Poems by Mark Chartier

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Special Education

“Always believe you can make a difference,
but never let your differences
keep you from what you believe.”

There’s so much to do for you
like teaching you how to ask to play
with the other kids on the playground,
when to borrow in subtraction,
when not to walk behind me
and give me bunny ears.
To teach you to check your work
even if you’re the right answer.

Maybe it’s the fetal alcohol syndrome that makes you forget
to wash your hair,
brush your teeth,
and to ask for help
to sharpen your pencil that isn’t dull.
And you’re always talking about that rock star
with the blonde wig.
Sometimes, I want more for you,
but usually, I want you to want more.

Dear Patience,
your eyes late with wonder
tapping the room
as you look around
for something to keep you,
not those cold mornings
when you couldn’t sit up straight
on the stone floors
of the Russian orphanage
where all you knew
were new voices.
There’s a sympathy to you
that pulls
like a pretty face to a camera.
You’re a sad
that never gets angry,
a wing
in a world without air.

You don’t push yourself to the front of the lunch line.
You don’t tell on every kid
that calls you the "R." word
You smile a smile
told in two tenses:
One now,
the other in probably.

And sometimes, you interrupt me
or call me crazy
when I’m trying to teach you the vocabulary word of the day
or how to look both ways
when you cross the street
and I want to call your mom
so she can fix you
like a shirt missing a button.

But you walked into my classroom this morning,
your pencil hidden behind your back
and gave me a note:
“Dear Mr. C,
I am not going to be at school tomorrow.
I am sorry.

Can you please give me the homework?
Thanks,”
Your expression
deep like pockets,
laughing that laugh and a half
when I give you sarcasm potted in a “No.”
Nope.
Uh-uh.

Dear Patience,
If you could not walk,
I would not walk for you.
I would not tell you to walk straight
just to walk straight.
I would let you stand on my shoes
and push you just enough
to build your balance
so that nothing less could fall you over.
I may have given the tests,
but you taught me
to never look a girl in the eye
when she’s crying
and pretend like she’s not.
Thanks,
P.S. You’re a rock star.

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Bystander

You stagger into my classroom,
papers falling from your books,
and I know you haven’t taken your medicine.
You look like your mom,
the sweatpants, the rushed hair,
the knock- knock, broken aspirin
bags under your eyes.

You look like her except
you’re Tiny.
Fourth grade doesn’t play by the rules
when your bio-dad left the game early.
It doesn’t explain life in future tense verbs or number facts,
or pinky swears.
It doesn’t open a hand
and ask, “Why?”
Even the psychiatric drugs
you take for ADHD,
depression and anxiety
don’t explain why
your mother leaves you in charge of your own medication.

In the morning, you say a crisp goodbye
that’s returned with muffling from under her covers
through the door with the hole you made
with a broomstick.
Her costing breaths are the answers
when you’re done making your own lunch
of two pieces of bread
and a can of Coke.
“Mom…?”

The door doesn’t talk back
when you want to say bye-bye,
take a spray of her vanilla perfume,
check that you know the wrong answers
to the questions that keep you blue-eyed;
and make sure you don’t mention the unmentionable.

Your stepfather came home from Iraq two weeks ago
and you’ve come to my classroom with a new bruise
every other day this week:
black ran blue on your shin;
red timed two on your arms;
saying you got them during testing,
saying you were Tough.
Tiny.
Tough.

You told me I could adopt kids.
But not you.
But maybe your daddy
and I
could be friends.

And I didn’t want to believe the faces on your bruises,
the scratch-marks around your elbows.
I wanted to think
You were just as clumsy as you said,
that a 2nd-grader did do it during morning recess,
or that it was Halloween
and you were dressed up as a girl
who’d been abused
as I picked up the receiver
and made a phone call
that was tougher than you.

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More Than a Disability

—for Alyssa

You’re standing next to me,
trying to get out of your words,
trying them on like new clothes
that don’t quite fit.
You’re stretching your sounds,
filling in extra words
that start rhythm to the sounds sewn.

A big breath in,
I wait,
keeping eye contact
so you won’t feel nervous,
or think I’m going to finish your sentence.
I want to hear it from you.
Fit.

Dear Forgiveness,
Life is not fair.
People are not fair.
There are some
who will wait for you
like the wind waits on goodbyes
and some who will try and speak for you,
birds carrying seed not their own.
Don’t let the mockers stem you,
a flower with tried roots.
Remember, beauty is a silk scarf
roughing the rocks.
Stay soft, the wind will tell you when.

At recess, you run around in your green shoelaces
giving your friends the playground poke.
Sometimes a boy pushes you on the swing,
your arms letting go
like a fire taking spirit,
saying “Higher,”
a two-teeth grin pursing your stutter.
And even when you accidentally kick that boy,
he still swings you,
he still looks down
when he tells you secrets,
his hands in his pockets,
the twitch of time,
holding a sweat only he cares,
getting you like vision through glass.

Forgiveness, were I able to shelve that stutter
out of your reach and into mine,
I would not say another word.
I would take a likely breath
and watch you speak to that boy
like those new clothes finally fit.

But can’t doesn’t play fair.
It doesn’t make things happen
the way we pray why.
So instead, I’ll just stand here
waiting for you to tell me
that kid who laughed at you at lunch
is the same kid you help during math
when it’s you that gives the morning its sake.
It’s not how you say it,
but what you say.
Thanks for filling my skies.