Teachers

What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Teachers”?

This was a whirlwind piece. I wrote it on my phone, on the bus ride home from school. I had figured out I was aromantic only a few days before, after a few months of lukewarm questioning, and it felt like romance had sprung up everywhere in response. The fanfiction character was added the day before (I saw it in history), the poem arrived in my inbox that morning, and I watched the YouTube video while walking to the bus that afternoon. That was also the day I read “I Walk Into Every Room and Yell Where the Mexicans At” by José Olivarez in my AP English Literature class. I had been so floored by that poem that my reaction was basically “I want to do that,” and that thought combined with my frustration with the recurrence of romance led to me frantically typing this poem on the bus. The piece owes the lack of capitalization and prose poem style to Olivarez’ impact, but more notably, the constant returning to the examples set by various authors as a way of anchoring it comes from the continual reappearance of the “white woman” within Olivarez’ piece. The only alterations I made after the initial drafting were phrasing tweaks and the addition of the reference to Frozen, as that appeared in the news a few days later and added to my frustration. Because of its reliance on allusions, it seemed particularly suited to the triptych style, so that’s exactly what I did.