My son’s friend likes Shakespeare
but hates school. Emmett’s a roughneck,
a red neck, a trampoline-jumping,
video-game-thumping player.
He’s read Hamlet and Macbeth.
Thinks they’re cool. But damnéd
Ds adorn his report card
like spells on the breath of witches
or stubborn spots on a lady’s hands.
So when their teacher assigns a paper
to discuss a book
the students have never read,
Emmett picks Hamlet.
“But you already read that,”
my son with his ethics in tow
and clever 4.0 says.
“I know,” Emmett says, his brilliant
method burning through the mask
of his matter-of-fact madness.
“And she’d never believe it.”


From Full Worm Moon: A Book of Poems (Cascade Books, 2018).
This poem first appeared in Verse Wisconsin (Summer 2010).
Used here with the author’s permission.