Jesse Nathan: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Scouts

 

There was a boy even stranger than I

who’d call me in the evening

to see if I’d come to Scouts. Something in me

hesitated. Then one morning

 

during eighth grade English we got hall passes

and did it in a stall in the bathroom

taking turns over the john,

as thrilling as clumsy.

 

We kept our secret.

But he came to seem a target

around that one-light town. The cut of his hair

or the way he laughed, or maybe

 

his jittery hunched-up walk.

For a while he went on calling me

to see if I’d go with him to Scouts.

Instead I learned: treat him low

 

or be treated so myself.

Once in Art while the others snickered

I planted tacks across his chair,

and he sat down and shot up so quick

 

the chair sprang backwards, a few silver tacks

still sticking in his rear, his roar

like the shining in the corners of his eyes,

snarling as he came at me with scissors,

 

and only the teacher’s lightning maneuver

kept me from my due.

After that he looked at me, if at all, like the traitor

I was. Later that year his dad moved him

 

to a Christian school where they teach

the planet was made in seven actual days

and dinosaur bones got planted by God

to amuse geologists and children.

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Jesse Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. He was a founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series, and now teaches literature in the English Department at UC Berkeley. His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and other magazines, and he’s been a recipient of fellowships from the Arts Research Center and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He lives in Oakland.

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                                  Boy Scouts at a swimming class at Boy Scout Camp in Florence, Alabama. Photograph, July 1942

       

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