Seven


If I lean back in my first-grade desk
and expose my throat to the drop-ceiling
and fluorescent lights then Becky McFarland
will be along to tickle me as she
moves up and down the rows in the classroom.
I bite mine off but she has fingernails
that scratch my throat and neck not too deeply
but just right. And after she's done me she's

off again, to the next boy, skipping girls.
Teacher's out of the room. She's already
told Becky to stop tickling the boys
like that. Becky said, Yes, Teacher, I won't,
and sat down. But as soon as Teacher leaves

she's at it again, so I wait my turn.
Tickle tickle tickle, she sings. Ha ha
ha. It's hard not to giggle back but I
seem less sensitive than before and want
her to dig harder into me. Besides,
I'm one of the last boys she comes to so
maybe her fingers are too tired to please.
On the other hand, warming up on me
as the first boy wouldn't be good, either.
I like to be somewhere in between her
 
graces. She's a nice girl, a friendly girl,
and when Teacher asks her to read from our
Dick-and-Jane primer, she never misses
an exclamation mark – she shows us all
that excitement. Me, I can't get worked up
 
like that about anything but baseball
and monsters and suppertime and fishing.
One day when I'm older I'll know women

other than my mother and my sisters
and have children, sons and daughters, some way.
And I'm too shy to ask if Becky knows
how – I'll bet she does and then she might show

me and I'm not ready to jump right in
and go that far, all the way to babies
and families and dying. I look at her
 
upside down face when she's tickling me – God's,
it looks like, though I've never seen it. Then
it smiles on the next guy and I'm smarter.
 

 
* Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Florida Review, Poem, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, and many other journals. She has written three books of poety Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse, 2004), The Weight of the World (BickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse 2008). She has a PhD and has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.