- Mar 22
- 1 min read
Exam
At the base of the wall, the typical institutional daffodils.
Like the scanner blinking on in the darkened exam room.
Inside, the cinderblocks have been painted
to look like cinderblocks and my students want to know
the difference between a happy ending and a beautiful one.
It has become common wisdom that we are to blame
for the teenager kidnapped off the street by plainclothes agents
because for a time we desperately wanted to be good
and wanted everyone else to know it and maybe
be good too. During the second breast scan my nipple
wrinkles like frog song under the wand. The constellation
of cysts is good news, actually. So random and yet symmetrical.
Every day another of my students is gone. They do not answer
the phone or turn in the short story I asked them to write
where they escape through an ordinary door set deep in the ocean.
A happy ending, I tell them (although I do not know for certain),
is when one very important person gets what they have wanted
from the very beginning. All the other possible endings are beautiful.
H.R. WEBSTER is the author of What Follows (Black Lawrence Press, 2022). Her poems can be found in POETRY, The Iowa Review, The Offing, Ecotone, AGNI, and Guernica. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.