The School of the Future Looks Just Like the Past

POETRY
Written By Jiordan Castle

By Jiordan Castle

only now bright index cards tetris the windows—teen dreams taped up: Graduate. Get my braces off. Fall in love. Pass gym. Today when I passed by a group of kids stirred the breeze with obscenities, meaning summer had arrived. Like the summer I was thirteen below the ferris wheel at my hometown Y. A boy I hadn’t seen since grade school said nothing before he ignited his lighter against the hard curve of my chin in a broken circle we called our friends. You remember—Whack-a-Mole, the squirt gun game, the claw machine. The belly-up goldfish in a plastic bag. The spark & his grin, a ring toss.

Jiordan Castle

Jiordan Castle is the author of the 2020 chapbook All His Breakable Things. A Pushcart-nominated essayist and poet, her work has appeared in Hobart, New Ohio Review, Third Point Press, Verdad, Vinyl, and elsewhere online and in print. She is a resident poet and essayist for the LA-based quarterly food and culture magazine Compound Butter, as well as writer and curator of the Pigeon Pages quarantine-inspired series The Long Pause… Jiordan has an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College and currently lives in New York City with her fiancé and their dog.

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