M.B. McLatchey    New Smyrna Beach      (Sarah Carey)      
Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal

Do not take. She makes you 
talk no matter where you sit. 

I greeted you at the door, another mother’s
child delivered. You looked away as if a lamb 
had been slain. Your early sounds parsed, seeds
seeking ground – then whole thoughts crowned. 

Ridiculous grader. She actually reads 
your work instead of the deserved A.

So hard to put a score on this – this wrestling with 
your age. Rubrics hold out such promise – then fold, 
fade. Instead of systems: a new thought, like a starling
transporting a golden bough, was what we praised. 

I didn’t come here to read ancient epics, poems, plays. 
Remind me again how this gets an engineer employed?

Leaving Troy, Odysseus had one thing – Ithaca – in mind. 
The gods gave him their scales: slay the proud boy in you 
and die a king regaled. A cyclops, sirens, a bard spared among 
suitors to sing your tale. All of them pleading: Set sail. Set sail.

Originally published in Sky Island Journal, Issue #23, Winter 2023.