Scattered and disorganized I am,
but I like to call it poetic,
the likes of e.e. cummings and William Faulkner,
I remember when I screamed and got sent
to timeout
because I wasn’t allowed to end my story
with a cliffhanger
but instead was forced to write:
“And that was what I did over the weekend”
in big ugly reluctant letters
at the bottom of the wide-ruled notebook page.
Writing a story is like making a wrap.
You need a conclusion
to roll it all up.
But what if I want
an open-faced burrito
with all the fillings
spilling out from over the sides?
And what if I want
to pick out the shredded-lettuce transition words
of “therefore” and “in conclusion”
and the diced-tomato topic sentences
and must-be-three-paragraphs rules,
because I don’t like my vegetables,
especially not the stale and soggy ones
that we must use in every wrap?
There’s only one way to make a wrap.
If you look at the rubric,
it tells you what to write,
and how to write it.
but the rubric says to “express myself,”
and how do I do that,
how do I become Dickens and Tolstoy
with their two-hundred-word-long sentences
when run-on phrases are the equivalents
of rotten chicken and moldy cheese?
They can break the rules
because they’re very good.
But what if I want
to be just like them,
Do I have to fold my burritos
by the only recipe that the
writing rubric gives me?
Yes. Because you’re just learning and
you’re not very good yet.
But when can I be good enough
to try a different flavor?
I don’t know, but it’s
certainly not today.
And the little wooden craft stick
with my name on it
gets moved from the green jar to the yellow jar
for bad behavior.
I keep quiet, because
even eating the same stale burrito
every day of second grade
is better than the red jar.