Rita Dove’s “Daystar” is one of my favorite poems, especially for the moment of building something beautiful where there was nothing before. This is how I think about both teaching and writing. In my high school English classes, I start each day by being a person with my students before I’m their teacher. I do this by asking about their weekend or their morning, by asking if anyone has anything to share and then telling stories of my own. Sometimes that moment passes quickly, but sometimes—as on the morning after the Dodgers won the World Series and a thrilled student acted out the last play to the class’s delight—this takes a while. Once, during an observation, an administrator noted it took several minutes to get class started. This led to a conversation about our differing perspectives: wasted time vs. relationship-building.
Relationships have become an important part of my writing life as well. Several years ago, Laura Passin invited me to be part of the December poets, an online group dedicated to writing a poem each day that month. We post them and offer comments—praise only, this time of year is dark enough—and this small addition to my life has made December my favorite month. I’m so grateful for this incredible community Laura has built. It has allowed the rest of us to build poems that would not exist without it, without each other. For example, when Ruth Williams noticed I was writing a whole series of form poems about becoming estranged from my childhood family, she suggested I invent a form. And I did! The rules are simple:
1. The first line is also the last line. I imagined these lines as the top and bottom of a box.
2. That first line also borders the left- and right-hand sides of the poem. I imagined those borders as the sides of a box.
And that’s it! Originally, I was simply going to call this a “box,” inspired in part by Jack Gilbert’s poem “Michiko Dead.” However, what I built led to Laura building a name for it—as she wrote a poem in this new form, the term “lockbox” struck her, and that felt so right to me.
Here is my first—the first!—lockbox:
Estranged Lockbox
My mother and brother find my poems about them.
My new ones, post-estrangement, that don’t feature my
mother as caretaker, folding my father’s socks, my mother
and martyrdom. Don’t amend brother (adopted) and
brother (asterisk) to brother. My mother and brother
find the poems that melt their faces into new shapes, find
my truth, which is different from theirs. They find my
poems about my brother stealing from our father, poems
about my brother shoving our mother to the ground. About
them pretending not to remember any of it. About them.
My mother and brother find my poems about them.
Even more exhilarating than inventing a form was reading other poets’ lockboxes. Several poets have written one; Laura and Courtney LeBlanc have each written two! Each one is beautiful and meaningful, and they only exist because of what we’ve all built together.
The December poets mean the world to me, and on reflecting why, I realize the group mirrors the way I teach. My students and I are a community, too. I don’t consider myself the sole imparter of knowledge; we’re collaborative. Discussion-based, not lecture-based. I have no PowerPoint, no agenda. When I assign reading, my students bring discussion questions to class, and we talk about what they find important. Every day, my students and I build something together, and it’s always a unique experience that only we could create. I can’t wait to show my students this new form I’ve built—not to brag, and not to require them to write their own lockbox or to invent their own form. To share with them about my life, as they share with me about theirs. To show them something I’ve built, and to see if it inspires them to build something of their own.
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Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Melissa is a high school English teacher in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.