Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,37

English class and flaunt my vampire intelligence and confidence. “To His Coy Mistress” was one of my favorite poems! Actually, it was part of my favorite genre of poems, which could be called Poems Guys Write to Get Girls to Sleep with Them. Maybe I like poetry for the same reason I like really clever rappers, like Nas and Talib Kweli and A Tribe Called Quest: because I secretly hope I can develop the verbal skills to seduce a woman. Sure, right now I can barely remember my name around hot girls like Kate, but I’m more likely to develop verbal skills than biceps.

“Mr. Kirkland, please pass on those poems,” she called out. “Mr. Kirkland!”

Mr. Kirkland, aka Nate the Nosepicker, woke up and then passed the pile. He forgot to give himself a copy.

“Now that you’ve had a few minutes to read this over for a first impression,” Mrs. Rove said, “can anyone tell me what this poem is about?”

Ashley Milano thrust her hand upward.

“Time’s wing-udd chariot,” Ashley Milano pronounced carefully. “That’s a symbol! It stands for… like, how everyone’s getting old really fast.”

Ashley Milano knew symbols. Her intelligence stopped there, but she knew symbols.

“Great, Ashley. We’ll definitely be discussing symbols later on,” Mrs. Rove said. “But can anyone give me the general synopsis of the poem? What is the narrator saying? Why did he write this?”

Matt Katz gave a huge snore that pulled his head off his chest. It was so loud he woke himself up. Kayla Bateman was sighing loudly to advertise her frustration at not being able to button her cardigan over her chest. Jason Burke scratched a tic-tac-toe board onto the corner of his poem. Only Ashley displayed any interest—she was hunting down and viciously stabbing at symbols and metaphors with a red pen.

“What is the goal of this poem?” Mrs. Rove asked again.

Silence. I took a final survey of the room. No one was going to speak up.

So I spoke up, without even raising my hand.

“Sex,” I said clearly.

Matt Katz’s snore turned into a choking cough. Jason Burke reached over to clap him on the back. Two girls in the corner painting their nails with Wite-Out widened their eyes at each other and giggled. Ashley Milano’s mouth dropped open. I’d never heard her be quiet for so long.

“Mr. Frame?” Mrs. Rove said.

She sounded stern, but I heard interest in her voice, too. She gestured for me to go on.

“The speaker of this poem wants to have sex,” I explained.

“Whaatttt,” Jason Burke drawled in disbelief.

“The speaker tells this woman that if they were both going to live forever, he’d take a lot of time and be romantic,” I explained patiently. “But they’re not, so he won’t. He wants to have sex right away.”

All through the room you could hear stifled laughter, a mild background sound, a buzzing, an indicator of excitement.

“All right, Mr. Frame,” Mrs. Rove said.

She walked out in front of her desk and crossed her arms, like a challenge to me. She asked, “Can you back this theory up with some evidence from our poem here?”

I held the paper in front of my face and examined it critically, although I practically knew the thing by heart. “To His Coy Mistress” was in the seventeen-pound Norton poetry anthology I’d requested for my eighth birthday. I’d read it then, and after puberty I’d read the poem again and saw new meaning in it.

“The speaker asks for sex directly in the last paragraph. He says, ‘let us sport us while we may.’ Basically, ‘let us do it.’ And in the second stanza, he tries to scare her by saying that if they don’t do it now, worms will get at her ‘long preserved virginity.’ The speaker thinks the girl has been a virgin for way too long.

“Further,” I continued, “in the first stanza, the growing ‘vegetable love’ is actually the guy’s erection.”

All over the classroom, students sat straight up.

“Which,” I added, grinning, “means the phrase ‘vaster than empires’ is pretty arrogant on his part.”

Mrs. Rove removed her glasses. When she sat down behind her desk, she seemed to relinquish to me the run of the class.

“What about the title, Mr. Frame?” Mrs. Rove asked. “I’m sure you have something to say about that.”

I cleared my throat, aware that everyone was watching me, and, for once, liking it.

“They said ‘coy’ back then,” I said. “But today, we would call her… a cock-tease.”

Nate Kirkland stopped midpick. Matt Katz had not only woken up, but started taking notes. Later I