Poem: Misses

A poem about a teacher.

The teacher made us stand on the desk
to recite times tables. She kept a bucket
of disinfectant filled with recorders —

it was the only way to stop them screeching.
She dunked a kid’s thumb in the bucket,
then stuffed it back in her mouth.

This foul method was to stop thumb-sucking.
When I wanted to know what a paragraph
indent was (the second word threw me)

she jabbed hard into my leg,
and said — “That’s an indent!”
She definitely left an impression.

She drove really fast to and from school.
But even before we saw that we all knew
she just did not want to be there.