The Blue Shirt Boys

I went with Angel last week to the Training School, which is what they call the juvenile prison. A few other teachers from AS220 met us there for the voluntary after-school classes. It was my first time there, and coincidentally the first classes of the semester. I was amazed at the faces of these young boys, a mix of Aztec princes and West Side Story gents. Sad, lively, and forgotten boys. I was hypnotized watching them in their cobalt blue shirts, some with collars and some without. I was soaking them up.

When I got home I ate cold left-over sesame noodles with lots of hot sauce. I went to bed very early and fell asleep in minutes. I woke at 4:30 a.m. thinking, where are the boys right now? I hope they are asleep. I got up and let my dog out and looked around my neighborhood. I spotted Michael, who lives across the street. He was nine in 1988 when we moved to Woonsocket, in a different neighborhood. He would knock on our door and ask to play with our two big dogs. Sometimes I turned him away. Now he's 29, a full-grown, handsome, angry, young man. Now he's a father, sometimes riding a motorcycle with his seven-year-old daughter on the back wearing a helmet, clutching his waist. Now he's dealing drugs and shouting curses at the neighbors. When he moved here we both recognized each other. We always wave hello. I hope he stays safe. I thought of the blue-shirted boys' faces again.

There was only one boy in the writing class I sat in on. He talked about getting married in prison, and seeing his daughter, who was born six months ago. We wrote poems, and he read his from his black-and-white composition notebook. I talked about the pitfalls of waiting for inspiration or stirring up drama as a way to get writing, and the importance of looking deeper to find the door behind the door. We laughed about the irony of all the clocks in the building being caged! He talked about books he liked. I said that I loved memoirs. He and I had both begun the same book! We had both read the opening pages of Blindness. I would like to visit again, and bring poetry.