Pleasant Street Elementary wasn’t always so… pleasant--
manned by mannish “misses”… barren, clucking, leathery
mummies uniformed in wallpaper dresses up the sleeves
of which they tamped their precious and glistening
nose-blown hankies--
patrolling in their black, dominatrix, strait-laced, commandant
high-tops… wielding those Teddy Roosevelt big sticks…
hungrily ferreting out punishable felonies with their rooster eyes
swollen bulbous and wild behind the coke-bottle lenses
beneath their 1943 steel-penny grey schoolmarm buns--
and every year the administration cheerfully shuffled your
Old Maid deck… while you waited with the bated breath of
the doomed Russian-rouletteer as they’d croon, Go ahead…
pick a card… any card… and then deal you Cinderella’s wicked
stepmother… Huck’s Miss Watson… or Pip’s Miss Havisham…
Can you say ‘fear and loathing’?
Can you say ‘P.T.S.D.’?