On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance

The setting of the poem is a classroom, full of “mopped floors and wiped-down / doorknobs” (Lines 3-4) and blue-eyed students with “freshly soaped necks” (Line 4). However, the speaker immediately, although perhaps subconsciously, recognizes a sense of false security. The scent of “fake-lemon antiseptic” (Line 2) permeates the room. This description conveys a familiar classroom scent but also sets up the juxtaposition between the “fake” (Line 2) world of the classroom and the natural world that would house a real lemon. The scent of real lemons is clean and sweet. The classroom world, personified by the teacher, while it “means well” (Line 5) houses danger in the form of the microaggression towards those who are different. The mess of the teacher’s mispronunciation of the speaker’s name has a gory element that no antiseptic can cover —“he butchers your name like / he has a bloody sausage casing stuck / between his teeth” (Lines 6-8). Further, the stain of the teacher’s “handprints / on his white sloppy apron” (Lines 8-9) contrasts the clean classroom with its “freshly soaped” (Line 4) students. An antiseptic prevents the growth of disease-growing organisms, but here, its artificial scent suggests it cannot work.