Ode to a Nobody

by Caroline Brooks DuBois

But the teachers can’t maintain order when someone farts and chaos and laughter ripple the eighth grade like a weather pattern across the midstate.

wouldn’t have noticed these as songs—if it weren’t for this poetry project, which is changing everything— even the very composition of me.

Suddenly everything is a blank page like the sky for a skywriting plane. I find a garage door torn from a house. A table in the alley missing its legs. A single brick wall left standing, once belonging to a mattress store. No one will mind a poem here or there, so I spray my words carefully: Neighbors, You got this! Persist! Recover! Rebuild! —Nobody