The First Boy Who Read My Poems
He read them slowly, and I have compared everyone to that since.
Jonah Meeks read my poems the way other people defuse bombs. Slowly, with his whole body, his lips moving over every line like the wrong syllable might take his hands off.
I was fifteen and I kept them in a green spiral notebook with a sticker of a whale on the cover, wedged between my mattress and the wall like contraband. Poems about my grandmother's hands. Poems about the boy who worked the register at the gas station. One truly terrible poem about rain that rhymed "sorrow" with "tomorrow," which should be a criminal offense, and in my defense, I was fifteen.
Nobody knew the notebook existed. My mother thought I was doing homework. My best friend Dana thought I was writing about her, which tells you everything about Dana. The poems were the one room in my life with a lock on it.
Then in October of tenth grade the notebook fell out of my backpack in fourth period English, spun once on the linoleum like a bottle deciding someone's fate, and slid under the desk of Jonah Meeks.
Jonah sat behind me and was famous for exactly two things: he could fix anyone's bike, and he almost never talked in class. When Mrs. Castellano called on him, he would go quiet for so long that the silence developed weather. I watched him pick up my notebook, and I did the math every teenage girl knows how to do instantly: social death, spring semester, closed casket.
He didn't open it. He just held it out to me across the aisle, and when I grabbed it he said, so only I could hear, "The whale's a good touch. Very intimidating."
I don't know what possessed me... To this day I don't. At the end of class I turned around and put the notebook on his desk and said, "Page twelve," and walked out of the room with my heart going like a washing machine with a brick in it.
Page twelve was the poem about my grandmother's hands.
He found me at lunch, at the far table by the recycling bins where I ate specifically to be unfindable. He sat down, opened the notebook to page twelve, and read it again, right in front of me.
And this is the part I have spent twenty years trying to explain to people.
He read it slowly. Not skimming-slowly, not bored-slowly. His index finger rested under the lines and moved like a rowboat. His lips shaped the words. When he got to the last stanza, the one where my grandmother's hands are folded and everyone pretends it looks natural, he stopped... went back two lines... and read them over.
Then he closed the notebook and looked at me and said, "Your grandma died in March, right? Around when we did frog dissections."
That was it. That was the whole review. And it was the most seen I had ever felt in my life, because he hadn't said it was good, he had said it was true, and he had fixed it in time, pinned it to frogs and formaldehyde and March, like it had really happened, because it had.
After that, it became a thing without either of us naming it. I'd write, and Wednesdays at lunch he'd read. He never wrote anything himself. He never edited me, either, except once, when he tapped the rain poem and said, "This one's a lie," and he was right, it was, I'd written it to sound like a poem instead of to say something. I have gotten harsher feedback since, in workshops, from editors, from a man in a writing class who called my imagery "domestic." Nothing has ever landed like this one's a lie from a boy with bike grease on his knuckles.
Were we in love? I've been asked. We held hands exactly twice, both times at the movies, both times letting go when the lights came up like we'd been passing notes in church. He smelled like WD-40 and wintergreen gum. In November he showed up at my house with a bent bike wheel as an excuse and stayed for three hours, and my mother, who trusted no one, let him wait inside. That has to count as something.
Junior year, his dad got transferred to Ohio. We promised to write, the way you do. He sent two letters. I sent five... then understood... then stopped. It didn't break my heart exactly. It was more like a library closing in a town that only had the one.
Here is where I'm supposed to tell you I found him on the internet at 35 and sparks flew.
That is not this story.
What actually happened is stranger and smaller. Three years ago his younger sister, of all people, turned up in my inbox because she'd read something I published and recognized my name. We got coffee when she passed through town. She was funny like him, quiet like him. And somewhere in the second hour she said, "You know he's dyslexic, right? Jonah. Diagnosed in college, finally."
I set my cup down.
"School was a nightmare for him," she said. "Reading anything took him forever. He used to say the letters wouldn't hold still."
All the way home I kept both hands on the wheel and did a different kind of math. The finger under the lines. The lips moving. Going back two lines and reading them over. I had spent twenty years believing Jonah Meeks read my poems slowly out of reverence, and the truth was that reading cost him more than it cost anyone I have ever handed a poem to, before or since. Every Wednesday lunch was a boy dragging a boulder up a hill for me.
And he never said a word about the boulder.
He read them slowly because reading was hard for him, and he read them anyway, and I have compared every love since to that.
I understand now why nothing else has measured up. Editors read my work quickly and well; men have read it flatteringly; a stranger once read a poem of mine out loud at an open mic and cried, which was lovely and mortifying in equal parts. But slow, effortful, secret attention, attention that costs the giver something they never invoice you for? That, it turns out, was the whole curriculum. Everything I know about being loved I learned from a childhood lunch table next to the recycling bins.
These days I try to give it back the only way I can. I read new writers the way he read me. There's a corner of a poetry site I visit for exactly this, profiles of writers nobody has heard yet, and I read them with my finger under the lines, going back when a stanza deserves it, and when one of them is true I tell them it's true, and when one of them is a lie I tell them that too, kindly, because that is also a way of paying attention.
The green notebook survived. Whale sticker, rain poem, all of it. It lives in a box of things I keep for memory's sake, and on page twelve, faint, in pencil, in handwriting that always looked like it was concentrating, there is a note I didn't find until years after Ohio: a small check mark, and one word.
"True."
He must have gone back and marked it some Wednesday when I wasn't looking. It took him forever to read, his sister said. The letters wouldn't hold still.
Mine did, for him. They still do.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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