Morgan Boyer is a Carlow University alumni with a BA in Creative Writing. Her debut chapbook, “The Serotonin Cradle”, is being released through Finishing Line Press in 2018. Boyer’s writing has been featured in Rune, the Critical Point, and the Pittsburgh City Paper.
German class vs French class
Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took
German. The leftovers weirdos took French
My 9th grade German class was the most
ethnically diverse one at Peters
with a Chinese & Indian
in a roll call filled with
Kayla’s, Lindsay’s, Zach’s & Taylor’s.
Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took German.
The leftovers weirdos took French.
My sister was a so-called “leftover”:
not geeky enough for German
not cool enough for Spanish
Alex watched a woman shove a baby out a window.
I watched a German-speaking Sam comfort Frodo
in Minas Tirith while Isengard was being
destroyed on the projector
in dimly-lit room of sleepy sixteen-year-olds.
Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took German.
The leftovers weirdos took French.
I had a crush on Ritvik, the only Indian-American boy in our grade
I stood up in front of a class of Italian-German
Catholic wonder-bread, stuttering over my words
as I pretended to be his waitress in Munich cafe
Alex came home & cast her French notebook
on the table next to her SAT prep sheets.
Cool kids took Spanish. Geeks took German.
The leftovers weirdos took French.
Ghosts of Second Avenue
One moment, a concrete cocoon shell left
behind on weed-ridden gravel lies on its back.
The undertaker has a one-story-tall pile of dead branches made
of the bones of Frick the prick as spiders claim the windows glazed
with dust from the Reagan era when the steel mills took their final
breath and they cut off the life support, watched them die in a
hospice bed with a chaplin restraining their relatives from
wringing each other’s necks over which hymns to pick
for the funeral service. Next to it, a building
no older than my second cousins, with grass cut
so evenly that’s so flat you could use it as a dinner plate. A parking garage
designed by a Carnegie-Mellon graduate student sits next to
it like its depressed, heteronormative, Donna Reed-era wife.
I was born as Ivan Ilyich was dying, his colleagues gambled away his
mansion, and Lisa’s husband Fedor bought a flat on the South Side, got
a job in web development as his wife became a nurse, picking up the
shards of glass of a broken man, as they baptize themselves in the
Allegheny to reincarnate themselves, fly back upwards, to form the new
castes by the shore that sit awaiting for the day their life-support cord is cut.