red jar

scattered and disorganized

I am,

but I like to call it

poetic,

the likes of e.e. cummings and William Faulkner,

I remember when I screamed and got sent to timeout

because I wasn’t allowed to end my story with a cliffhanger

but instead was forced to write

“And that was what I did over the weekend”

in big ugly reluctant letters

at the bottom of the wide-ruled notebook page.

Writing a story

is like making a wrap.

You need a conclusion

to roll it all up.

but what if I want

an open-faced burrito

with all the fillings

spilling out from over the sides?

and what if I want

to pick out the shredded-lettuce transition words

of “therefore” and “in conclusion”

and the diced-tomato topic sentences

and must-be-three-paragraph rules,

because I don’t like my vegetables,

especially not the stale and soggy ones

that we must use in every wrap?

There’s only one way

to make a wrap.

If you look at the rubric,

it tells you what to write,

and how to write it.

but the rubric says to “express myself,”

and how do I do that,

how do I become Dickens and Tolstoy

with their two-hundred-word-long sentences

when run-on phrases are the equivalents

of rotten chicken and moldy cheese?

They can break the rules

because they’re very good.

but what if I want

to be just like them,

do I have to fold my burritos

by the only recipe that the

writing rubric gives me?

Yes. Because you’re just learning and

you’re not very good yet.

but when can I be

good enough to

try a different flavor?

I don’t know, but it’s

certainly not today.

and the little wooden craft stick

with my name on it

gets moved from the green jar to the yellow jar

for bad behavior.

I keep quiet, because

even eating the same stale burrito

every day of second grade

is better than the red jar.