The Learning Hours
Like a listless gate to the coarse
grasses I grieve, palms swing
when rainfall softens
the parts of sky dragged outward
over the bay. Macaws shuttle east
like heat-waves and the AC
rigged the side of the gym whirs
like a boy slumbering in shade.
Trash floats in from the lees—
not driftwood, not debris
from the inland rivers,
lost and expected. A student stays
after class because a poet,
he had read, swam across a river
holding the pages in the air
to keep them dry. Why? I look
outside toward the river
where old clothes and rags twist
into knots on the chain-link.
Caiman cut shallow paths in ravines.
Was it possible, to prioritize
words over your own body?
It would have been easy to lie,
to see what I wanted. Dolphins
instead of oil drums, trawlers
in the dead calm instead
of cruise ships, a scarlet ibis
wheeling over a flare stack,
not its flame. I held those learning
hours like a fuse, a smooth
endless route bound
for waves. It’s like that
only today is a rare day,
my students’ heads turn down
to study. The forest flinches
like a reflex. Outside the classroom,
a hook thrashes the mango tree
for bounty and I let go
of what I can explain from what leaps
from the dark, breathless, draped in rain.
Welcome Orientation
Our binders hold photos of volcanos,
different stages of eruptions to close
the school. There are three drills
a year, safety zones should the sound of blasting
rock ricochet down the valley. It’s been fifteen years.
Still, people who live above nine thousand feet
wear gas masks on days ash falls. Sunscreen dispensers
stationed at the entrance of each hall frame
cartoon clouds turned red. We drink papaya
juice and break bolones verdes filled with stiff cheese.
We form a circle and state why we teach.
Hope is a common theme. Cash is fanned out
on cafeteria tables, a starting bonus. We tuck the bills
into pockets, sign the contract beneath
yellow sun umbrellas in the courtyard.
The fountains have been turned on for this.
Rosters slide through our hands
like dying sun out of reach. Before
dismissing the new teachers on the southbound,
veterans circle the names of red flags.
On the way back to the hotel,
Cotopaxi’s glacier withdraws from the windshield,
its half-lit hour already resembling
something holy. After moving
from the hotel, the vertigo pulled me
to walls where the volcano towered
inside a glass window. Always,
it disappeared behind fog into the updrafts
of my own daydreaming.
In my best moments, it’s imaginary.
Stands in the middle of it all.
Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of the poetry collection, In The Country of Hard Life and Rosebuds, winner of the 2023 Idaho Prize for Poetry, and Conditions of The Wounded, finalist for the 2021 Brittingham and Felix Pollack Poetry Prize, published in the Wisconsin Poetry Series. Her work appears in Blackbird, The Missouri Review Online, Tin House, and others. She has received honors from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and teaches in Denver. For more information, please visit annaleighknowles.com