Starship Tahiti: Poems

Rose M. Singer

14 Rose M. Singer Sam says the women are harder to teach. Harder than the male inmates corralled daily into my room, raging at reflections in that mirror-less space, Bison and Menace throwing punches in the hallway as guards hit body alarms and I bear hug Bison from behind. Harder than the day a female counselor spoke to my class, one of those Beckett says won’t let you refuse a cup of coffee, and the guys in the front row reached into their FUBU sweats and pulled out their cocks, automatons raging against the inferno. Even harder than that, Sam insists. We talk this way to survive. I call on him to prove it. One morning he got a call to sub for a math teacher in Rose M. Singer, a women’s jail whose name suggests a gentle convalescent for flappers or former jazz greats. Brought in handcuffed and in leg shackles, they were seated at desks and given short pencils without erasers, no means of correction, 15 just cross outs and do overs. Sam wrote an algebra equation on the board: 3X + 1= 2Y and asked them to solve for X. Two students began arguing about the solution, no single letter capable of standing for the rage at what was missing, and since neither had enough room to swing, one reached into her orange jumpsuit, pulled a used tampon from her vagina and slapped the other woman across the face with it, with X, Defiant X, solve that bitch, X lost on the linoleum floor, sweet jelly roll done gone and left this world of sin, the substitute for slave names and the letter etched over the eyes of the dead. X, which multiplied and signed at the end of letters means love. ...