Lois Marie Harrod

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Lunch at Lakewood Middle School

(a 14-line sonnet)

 

We grunts were sitting there, and I the serious one who likes funny
the way French huntsmen like foxes, said, note their green brit-
ches in these multi-collateral picture books we are forced to read out-
loud to our seventh graders to fit them into their standardized socks.

Wouldn't it be easier if everything electric could be plugged into
the same socket? We could take any old hair dryer to what was Czecho-slovakia.
We wanted to be uplifted, of course, shocked out of our sneers
but it was tricky in a thoroughly departmental office where none of us

had a desk. Once again Mia nibbled her tuna fish sandwich.
and outside the door, the police sniffed by like crippled bloodhounds.
Meanwhile, Sam read his newspaper: Natasha Richardson had taken

a little fall in the snow, and the bump led to a massive brain bleed.
No giggles there either, but we all laughed when I pretended
to be Stanley and groaned "Stella." It was the way we taught lit.

Lois Marie Harrod's chapbook Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backward (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 350 of her poems have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Zone3. Seven-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize, she teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.