The Life and Times of Benny Alvarez by Peter Johnson Page B

bait.”
    â€œYou mean you stick a hook into them?”
    I wonder how someone so smart can ask such a dumb question, but I say, “Yeah, they’re usually very juicy.”
    She cringes, and I’m guessing that’s what Caulfield means by an image being powerful. So I decide to tone things down or we’ll end up writing about ballet shoes instead of night crawlers.
    â€œDid you write a draft of the poem last night?” I ask.
    â€œI focused more on jotting down nighttime images.”
    â€œReally?” I say, thinking this won’t be too helpful. “Like what?”
    â€œLike the sound of a railroad car, wet grass, a streetlight, a baby crying.” And she rattles off about five more. “What about you?” she asks.
    â€œI actually wrote the whole poem last night.”
    She seems surprised and asks me to read it.
    â€œâ€˜My grandpa and me go fishing, but first we get night crawlers, creepy little creatures with big noses. They look like fingers someone cut off as they crawl around. But we grab them and I don’t mind getting all wet and dirty.’”
    She’s looking at my sheet of paper, pursing her lips like she just sucked on a lemon. “It kind of reads like sentences,” she says, way too loudly, and I can feel Claudine eavesdropping. “Also,” she adds, “we can’t have the name of the object in the poem. People are supposed to guess it.” She’s right about that.
    â€œBut it’s got poetry,” I say, “the way I talk about them having noses and compare them to fingers.”
    Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m sure she glances at Claudine before saying, “That’s good, but we’re going to have line breaks, right, and maybe rhyme?”
    In fact, I had no intention of having line breaks. “Yeah, sure,” I say.
    â€œI mean,” she adds, “I thought we could make the poem sound like the slurping noise night crawlers make when they go in and out of their holes.”
    Slurping noise?
    â€œWe’ll get it right,” I say, “but maybe we should write something we can take home and fiddle with.”
    So we write separately for a while, and I give her this:
    Â 
    My grandpa and me
    go fishing but first
    we capture them,
    creepy little creatures with big noses.
    They look like fingers someone cut off
    as they crawl around. But we grab them
    and I don’t mind getting all wet and dirty.
    Â 
    Why mess with perfection? So all I do is get rid of the “night crawlers” and change “get” to “capture.” Who cares where I break the lines?
    Right before class ends, she slides a sheet over to me:
    Â 
    The last automobile of the night passes,
    And I fall on a blanket of grass.
    My left hand catches them coupling.
    Rooted to the ground yet aspiring upward.
    Anonymous.
    Â 
    I’m not too sure what I think of this, but at least it doesn’t rhyme. “Really terrific, Sara,” I say.
    â€œYou think so?”
    â€œYeah, it almost reads like a finished poem,” and I’m not lying about that, though I can’t make sense of that “Anonymous.”
    Ms. D interrupts us by saying, “Time’s up. Why don’t you work on each other’s drafts tonight? Then on Friday, you can meet in pairs again, and on Monday we’ll read them.”
    In the hall, I ask Beanie how he made out. He was paired with Bethany Briggs. “Okay, I guess.”
    â€œJust okay?”
    â€œI don’t think either one of us cares much.”
    â€œWhat are you writing on?”
    Suddenly, Claudine’s busybody voice invades my space. “You can’t ask him that.”
    Beanie doesn’t want to agree but knows she’s right. “It is a kind of a contest, dude.”
    Claudine smiles, and before walking away, shakes her finger at me. “And don’t think you’re going to bully Sara into writing a prose poem.”
    Ah,