Week Eight - Sign Inventory - "Sixth Grade" by Marie Howe

Sixth Grade

The afternoon the neighborhood boys tied me and Mary Lou Mather
to Donny Ralph's father's garage doors, spread-eagled,
it was the summer they chased us almost every day.

Careening across the lawns they'd mowed for money,
on bikes they threw down, they'd catch us, lie on top of us,
then get up and walk away.

That afternoon Donny's mother wasn't home.
His nine sisters and brothers gone - even Gramps, who lived with them,
gone somewhere - the backyard empty, the big house quiet.

A gang of boys. They pulled the heavy garage doors down,
and tied us to them with clothesline,
and Donny got the deer's leg severed from the buck his dad had killed

the year before, dried up and still fur-covered, and sort of
poked it at us, dancing around the blacktop in his sneakers, laughing.
Then somebody took it from Donny and did it.

And then somebody else, and somebody after him.
And then Donny pulled up Mary Lou's dress and held it up,
and she began to cry, and I became a boy again, and shouted Stop,

and they wouldn't.
And then a girl-boy, calling out to Charlie, my best friend's brother,
who wouldn't look

Charlie! to my brother's friend who knew me
Stop them. And he wouldn't.
And then more softly, and looking directly at him, I said, Charlie.

And he said Stop. And they said What? And he said Stop it.
And they did, quickly untying the ropes, weirdly quiet,
Mary Lou still weeping. And Charlie? Already gone.

Marie Howe

 

-The words become part of the poem. Nothing denotes/seperates speech from the descriptive acts of the boys (quotation marks, italics, etc.).

-The names--very specific, for one. But Mary Lou Mather really sticks out--sounds almost How the Grinch Stole Christmas? But eitherway it's very childish, highly innocent.

-Understandably, men are very much involved in this world--it's a father's garage door, it's lawns the boys cut, it's the emphasized action of them throwing down the bikes.

-Likewise, the gang-menality of the continual "they." The "they did it, and then they did it again, and again" moment, also.

-Interesting moment in the middle of the poem when the speaker teeters between genders.