{"id":671,"date":"2010-05-11T18:05:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-11T18:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=671"},"modified":"2010-05-11T18:05:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-11T18:05:00","slug":"gale-acuff-remembers-first-grade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/gale-acuff-remembers-first-grade\/","title":{"rendered":"Gale Acuff remembers first grade"},"content":{"rendered":"


Seven<\/span>


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

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

she's at it again, so I wait my turn.<\/span>
Tickle tickle tickle<\/span>, she sings. <\/span>Ha ha<\/span>
ha<\/span>. It's hard not to giggle back but I<\/span>
seem less sensitive than before and want<\/span>
her to dig harder into me. Besides,<\/span>
I'm one of the last boys she comes to so<\/span>
maybe her fingers are too tired to please.<\/span>
On the other hand, warming up on me<\/span>
as the first boy wouldn't be good, either.<\/span>
I like to be somewhere in between her<\/span>
 <\/span>
graces. She's a nice girl, a friendly girl,<\/span>
and when Teacher asks her to read from our<\/span>
Dick-and-Jane primer, she never misses<\/span>
an exclamation mark \u2013 she shows us all<\/span>
that excitement. Me, I can't get worked up<\/span>
 <\/span>
like that about anything but baseball<\/span>
and monsters and suppertime and fishing.<\/span>
One day when I'm older I'll know women<\/span>

other than my mother and my sisters<\/span>
and have children, sons and daughters, some way.<\/span>
And I'm too shy to ask if Becky knows<\/span>
how \u2013 I'll bet she does and then she might show<\/span>

me and I'm not ready to jump right in<\/span>
and go that far, all the way to babies<\/span>
and families and dying. I look at her<\/span>
 <\/span>
upside down face when she's tickling me \u2013 God's,<\/span>
it looks like, though I've never seen it. Then <\/span>
it smiles on the next guy and I'm smarter.<\/span>
 <\/span>

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

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SevenIf I lean back in my first-grade deskand expose my throat to the drop-ceilingand fluorescent lights then Becky McFarlandwill be along to tickle me as shemoves up and down the rows in the classroom.I bite mine off but she has fingernailsthat scratch my throat and neck not too deeplybut just right. And after she's done […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}