recess is fifty minutes 

if they haven't yet 
i hope the girls put
their teaspoons down--
they're carrying the spoons
in their mouths to balance
uncooked eggs. they walk
cautiously across the school yard
& there is a teacher with a whistle 
teasing them 
& telling the girls to trip.
recess is fifty minutes 
which is much shorter than 
it seems-- not even long enough
to dig up the roots of the tree.
they want to capsize it--
they want to see the tree 
laying on its side-- tentacles 
dangling with dirt. 
a boy has a knife 
in a Tupperware container
& he shows the other kids--
he says that his mom uses 
the knife to cut legs
of rotisserie chicken. the sun
is a foil-wrapped rotisserie chicken--
the smell dripping down on 
the pavement. no one tells on 
the boy with the knife 
because they're scared he'll
use it-- that he might 
get up on the jungle gym
& take a stab at the sun.
the kids like the sun. 
they want to keep it up
there in the clouds 
even if it does 
smell greasy. the girls 
imagine boys carrying teaspoons
in their mouths & they almost
laugh to themselves because
it's clear that the boys 
wouldn't be able to handle 
that kind of gentleness.
the girls see a sidewalk covered 
in broken eggs. they imagine
the yolks getting on their sandals,
those unmade chickens 
glowing yellow. the boy
is curious about what that's like,
to hold a teaspoon in your mouth 
all recess. he puts
the knife in his mouth & 
walks back & forth across
the jungle gym bridge-- imagines
the knife as a beak. he is a bird
that he thinks 
might go rotisserie.
recess is fifty minutes long
which is much longer than
it might seem. the girls
don't know what the point
of recess is. the teacher
blows the whistle three times
& the knife falls out
of the boys mouth
& into the mulch. he runs away from it
while the girls walk in a neat line
teaspoons in mouths. 
just inside the door
they take the teaspoons out
& don't know what to say having
spent all that fifty minutes 
in their own heads. 
one of the girls almost breaks
her egg on purpose,
she thinks about how the egg
would ooze on the tile floor
how the whistle might tell her to spend 
next recess up against 
the brick wall. how 
from there she could
watch what the boy does 
with his knife.