Community College Students Read Remora, Remora

They come straight from bed or a shift
at some stopgap job.
Their coats and packs sandbag the aisles                               
as if to slow a flood.
On their desk is space for an elbow, a notebook,
a phone on which some read the poem,
swiping through stanzas.

They complain about the city bus,
the shitty bus, and a rider,
the maluco who talks close to your face.
Someone takes out a bottle of cherry mimosa
hand crème, passes it around.
They soften their skin for this.

I am their teacher.
They call me “Miss?”
always with a question at the end.
“Miss?” they say, “Poets are crazy.”
And I wonder how they got this impression.

I picked poems that combed their hair,
those ready for an interview.
Here is a poem about a lanyard, I said.
And a root cellar. An ode to tomatoes
that could make you feel rich,
even if all you had was a tomato.

And still the man in the back,
who lost his wife and then his mother,
raised three girls alone on an island country,
he says, “poets have to be crazy.”
He points to the poem about a fish
attached to a fish,
attached to another,
clinging to a sucker shark,
attached to a shark.

“Who notices a parasite,” he asks,
when a predator circles?”
And then I understand what they mean by crazy.
There is a mad extravagance to such attention.
A baffling luxury to get this close,
to see the once invisible.

What I don’t say is this:
You must be crazy too
since you’ve courage enough
to talk poetry in the morning,
as the great sea all around is feeding.

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