But Rebecca hates doing presentations! Ugh!
My English professor has assigned us each to do a presentation on a literary magazine. I'm presenting something called The Missouri Review tomorrow, and the ironic thing is that while I was scrolling through their archives, I came across a poem they published a few years back titled "X-Men"! How cool is that? I'm so going to pass this to the class.
"X-MEN," by Nicholas Allen Harp
Today in the School for Gifted Youngsters, Xavier's lesson plan calls
for sex education, the hows and whos, wheres and whens dispensed
delicately, his bald brow furrowed serious, his students wide-eyed,
chuckling, unabashedly alive and constantly, at risk from you-name-it:
G-men, invasive telepathy, Plutonian radiation, slack-jawed villains,
and now, he can't believe it, gonorrhea, pregnancy, AIDS, each
contemporary malady less innocent than the one before, a curriculum
chock-full of acronymic woe and code -- IUD, HIV, RU-486 -- too many
physical choices in the modern world, Xavier thinks, too many forces
stitching lifeforce inextricably to doomed youth, their piss and vinegar
mutated into glowy juice, concussion orbs, optic blasts, blizzards
summoned by sheer merge of will, their bodies already breaking out
from under themselves, pushing and yanking their skins like the
colleague they call Fantastic, their young lives catapulted into flight
(literally, he thinks, flight) to some fate he cannot, despite his infamous
prescience, predict, a factored variable he'll have to follow, patiently,
like a serial; the X of a xenophobic country, lonesome X-mases,
X-ratings, the X's and O's he'll send his students when he expels them
to the dangerous world.