Rules at the Juan Marcos Huelga School (Even the Unspoken Ones)

1) No more than one child
out of the classroom at one time.


2) The upstairs classes will not
make excess noise because there
are no walls between classes and
the noise carries downstairs too.

3) Any mothers coming
into the classroom send them
to the principal’s office, unless
they are teachers’ helpers.


4) No running
in the hallways or stairways.







5) No screaming or shouting
in the classrooms,
hallways, or stairways.


6) No throwing of paper
or trash on the floor.







7) No one can go to Poppa Burger.







8) If you take your class
to the park, be sure
that everyone crosses
the street, going and coming.

9) All shirts will be buttoned.






10) Be sure that your classroom
is reasonably clean before
you let the class out
at the end of the day.

 

[They might run away, a monarch
butterfly tugged in the direction of
the wind.]

[Noise that needs to be made should
flame out in a bonfire, out on the
roof, where sunlight can hear it all.]


[They need to go, to help the
principal birth a school that can
speak and spell the words
revolución, and work, and hands,
and huelga.]

[Wait for nighttime, children,
when you can run and race around
in the dark, in the cool of the trees,
yelling you caught a star on the tip
of your tongue, then you realize you
ran around till morning and it is the
dew on the tips of tree leaves you
taste.]

[Shout on paper, write boldly,
in a book, in the middle of an open
field, in the street, in the classroom,
make sure your voice shrills.]

[In my class, I will teach you
to throw Molotov cocktails, bright
orange ones, that whistle in the air,
and when they smash on those crazy
school laws, they will burst in a
bright yellow the scent of lemon,
burnt wood that will take over for
a few days.]

[In the future, the streets are still
the same, and in December, on a
Tuesday afternoon in 2016, one of
your descendants will be stabbed
merely for standing in the day.
The Northside knows scar, knows
body, when it needs to mourn.]

[Move in packs, march the streets
together, keep the body flickering,
make the voice resist quiet, this
going, this coming, is resistance.]

[This is how we mean business:
you come to school, bien fino,
and we will teach you the four
winds, the reason we are always
armed to the touch of a blade, we
are always blades, bien filosos.]

[One day all these classrooms
will no longer hold any of us,
leave no evidence we were here,
we exist in the whisper,
the tender cinnamon strings in
muscle. Marcha ya.]