This week we are proud to feature “Career Day” by Alexandra Teague. The poem is previously unpublished. Alexandra Teague’s first book of poetry, Mortal Geography, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was published by Persea Books in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Best New Poets 2008, and journals including The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and New England Review. A 2006-08 Stegner Fellow and a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she is currently in transition between Fayetteville, AR, Oakland, CA, and Moscow, ID, where she will begin in the Fall as Assistant Professor of Poetry.
Author’s note:
“Career Day” is based on a real event, although as a child, I didn’t really understand all the social mores involved (probably I still don’t, hence the poem). A few years ago, I was one of the only people in costume at a party; since my costume didn’t clearly announce itself, yet wasn’t something I would really wear, I kept self-consciously explaining. Strangely isolating, and, in retrospect, humorous. The idea that costumes can present any identity — even ethnicity — interests and disturbs me as well. When I was growing up in 1970s Texas, “Indian” was considered a perfectly viable Halloween costume, and no one would have corrected Wym for aspiring to grow up to be an Indian, if only he had worn the outfit on the right day.
Career Day
When Wym Van Wyk mixed up his Mondays
and walked into kindergarten a whole week early
in lace-up moccasins and fringe — two feathers
sprouting from his short blonde hair — we twisted
in our seats to point and stare. And a twittering arose,
confused, then joyous, body by body, that it was
not us, there in the one-ring circus of our fears.
We had been spared by oxford cloth and pleated plaid,
by parents who re-read permission slips. Our futures
destined to occur as planned: the firefighter-presidents
chasing the ballerinas up the jungle gym, the teachers
eating candy chalk. But today we were children, and when
he began to cry we didn’t turn away. We watched
his war paint smear; we watched his small canoe
of hope get swept over the falls. We saw how
it happened: the green-glass moment when the river
lied, and he poised on the brink — the first and last
Dutch Texas Indian — uncomprehending the eyes
of his tribe on the shore, merciless, the inevitable plunge.
I love the story that your poem tells, the pressures of being a child, the merciless judgement of other children. Love the last five lines.
Dear little Wym Van Wyk, my kindred spirit! His mother must have been just like mine. I will never forget how I sashayed into my kindergarten’s Cowboy Day in fancy hat and boots, fringed vest and skirt, studded holster and pearl-handled gun. . .one day early. . .