Free Verse by Sarah Dooley

Author:Sarah Dooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-03-04T16:50:44+00:00

15

It’s Thursday, which means poetry club, and I’ve been looking forward to it all day long. The buses pull away past the windows while kids bang locker doors closed out in the hallway. Poetry club kids come in one or two at a time, snagging popcorn or pushing chairs together to sprawl out on, until there are nine of us in the room, plus Miss Jacks.

I love how different the classroom is now from how it was twenty minutes ago in English class. It doesn’t feel formal anymore. Kids make themselves at home, getting comfortable. I’m surprised how quick they’ve accepted me as one of the group. They’ve accepted Jaina, too, even quicker than me. She acts like she was born here. The two of us sit on the floor side by side. Jaina’s tossing a beanbag back and forth with Angie, who suddenly wings it at Anthony’s head. He catches it almost without looking, and Jaina applauds.

“Who wants to start?” Anthony asks, tossing the beanbag into the air and catching it a few times. “Oh, wait, wait, that’d be me. I need everybody to write down their email addresses if I don’t already have them. That means you”—he points at Jaina—“and you.” He points at me. “I’m going to email you the contest rules, and I want everybody to email me back a poem. Everybody! Email me back a poem by this time next week! The deadline’s at the end of the month, and the next one’s not till August! I need your entries so I have time to let Miss Jacks tear them to pieces!”

“Give constructive feedback,” Miss Jacks corrects.

Anthony rips a sheet of paper from his notebook, tears it in half, and paper-airplanes each half to me and Jaina. “Writing down your email address means I have express permission to email you the summer newsletter.”

“Is there poetry club in the summer?” Jaina asks.

“No, but like I said, there’s a newsletter. And that newsletter, penned by author, poet, and world-class journalist Anthony Tucker”—he takes a bow—“will suggest various poetry forms you can be practicing so that when we come back at the end of August, you’ll have something written for the competition. Because, so help me, people, somebody who is sitting in this room right now had better win one of those scholarships—or else!”

I’m not wild about the idea of Anthony Tucker having my email address. I write it down, but I don’t hand it back yet.

“Now. Who wants to start?”

“I wrote an acrostic,” Lisa volunteers, puffed up with importance.

Anthony chucks the beanbag at her and she jumps, startled, and misses it. Angie kicks it back over to her, and she picks it up by a corner. “What do I do with this?”

“It means you have the floor,” Anthony says. “Take it quick, before I change my mind.”

“Like you can stop me from talking.”

“Go on, go on. An acrostic?”

“I remembered it from elementary school, and I looked it up online. It’s where you use the letters of a word, like your name, as the first letter in each line.

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