Sunday, January 31, 2010

At Twenty-Eight

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.

~Amy Fleury                                                                                      

Saturday, January 30, 2010

A Secret Matter of Grave Importance

Except when once we drew identical lots
nothing’s ever come between us.
We keep our drifts of space
spare and daily shake our down.

You’ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs
and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts.
Stuck with sharp wind, both
bloods are rare and rarely do

we taste the walnut’s knot of oil.
We wake between our fitted sheets
and shake our fists or pretend real fright
but not in this do we dare touch.

My rib cage can stand in yours, yours
become the swinging doors through which
magician’s swords will slice and miss
that knotted muscle. It is a trick.

We’ll make an endless show of the outright
clanking, irregular beating of our acrobatic hearts.
We’ve designed the double bars of depth;
our hearts skip — the tumbleset we think

is absence, the somersault we call forbearance
—the hearts are there, doing turns that teach
us to count and keep each finger
close to its own sly pulse.

~Dara Wier                                                                                        

Friday, January 29, 2010

[Over a cup of coffee]

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or
walking the dog, he would recall some incident
from his youth—nothing significant—climbing a tree
in his backyard, waiting in left field for a batter's
swing, sitting in a parked car with a girl whose face
he no longer remembered, his hand on her breast
and his body electric; memories to look at with
curiosity, the harmless behavior of a stranger, with
nothing to regret or elicit particular joy. And
although he had no sense of being on a journey,
such memories made him realize how far he had
traveled, which, in turn, made him ask how he
would look back on the person he was now, this
person who seemed so substantial. These images, it
was like looking at a book of old photographs,
recognizing a forehead, the narrow chin, and
perhaps recalling the story of an older second
cousin, how he had left long ago to try his luck in
Argentina or Australia. And he saw that he was
becoming like such a person, that the day might
arrive when he would look back on his present self
as on a distant relative who had drifted off into
uncharted lands.

~Stephen Dobyns                                                                             

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Ice Plant in Bloom

From where I stood at the field’s immaculate edge,
walking past the open patch of land that’s money bounded,
in California’s flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses
occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders,
simple casual types, plus a few plumbers, children of lettuce-pickers
and microchip princes, grandchildren of goatherds and orchard keepers
who pruned and picked apricot trees that covered what wasn’t yet
block after block. Vaporized by money, by the lords and ladies of money,
in one month, on one block, three bungalows bulldozed, and the tanky smells
of goatherds and, before them, dirt farmers who never got enough water,
held momentary in the air like an album snapshot’s aura,
souls of roller-rink sweethearts and sausage-makers fleeing
heaps of crusty lath, lead pipe, tiny window casements,
then new foundations poured for cozy twelve-room houses.
So what was she doing in that field among weeds and ice plant?
The yellow and pink blooms spiking around her feet like glory?
Cranking her elbow as surveyors do, to a bored watcher in the distance,
she fanned the air, clouds running low and fast behind her.

A voice seeped through the moodless sunlight
as she seemed to talk to the flowers and high weeds.
She noticed me, pointed in my direction. Accusation, election,
I could not tell, nor if it was at me myself
or the green undeveloped space she occupied,
welded into her grid by traffic noise. Okay!
A word for me? A go-ahead? Okay! Smeared by the wind
and maybe not her own voice after all. I held my place.
She would be one of the clenched ministers adrift
in bus terminals and K-Marts, carrying guns
in other parts of America, except she dressed like a casual lady of money,
running shoes, snowbird sunglasses, wristwatch like a black birthday cake.
The voice, thin and pipey, came from the boy or girl,
blond like her, who edged into view as I tracked the shot. The child,
staring down while he cried his song, slowly tread the labyrinth
of ice plant’s juicy starburst flesh of leaves.
Okay! He follows the nested space between flowers that bristle at his feet,
his or hers, while the desiccated California sky so far from heaven and hell
beams down on us beings of flower, water, and flesh before we turn to money.
The sky kept sliding through the tips of weeds. The sky left us behind.

~W.S. Di Piero                      

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I Was Always Leaving

I was always leaving, I was about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

~Jean Nordhaus                                                                                              

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

First Job

All evening I hunted
the bird that wanted
a cage of glass,
here where cemetery
slides into creek, fronting
what was once the largest
indoor leather mill in the world.
There the skins gathered
for cleansing, coloring,
scraping, shipping off.

It closed three years after
a lone sparrow set up camp
behind the only desk
in the only full-serve
service station left in town
where, from four to seven
nightly one summer,
I blackened the pages
of books with my thumbs.

Whatever it sought there—
thumping its frightened body
against glass, into cabinets
or out to the bays
scrubbed raw with gasoline
where the broken waited
to be raised up, hosed off,
fastened together in hope
of coughing to life again—
whatever it sought was not a dollar
slipped through a window cracked
because patronage was right
for the aging ladies of August to provide
from Chryslers cool in the sun.

There was nothing to be found
in books or boxes of parts.
And the tools hanging from pegs
were as useless as my hands,
which could not patch together
those straggling conveyances
any more than I could
with a tattered broom
batter the bird to freedom
as I swung at fluttering terror
as I sought with useless devices
some fortune reposed
in corners of grease and dust.

~Joseph Campana                                                                                             

Monday, January 25, 2010

A Wedding

She was in terrible pain the whole day,
as she had been for months: a slipped disc,
and there is nothing more painful. She

herself was a nurse’s aide, also a poet
just beginning to make a name for her
nom de plume. As with most things in life,

it happened when she was changing channels
on her television. The lucky man, on the other
hand, was smiling for the first time

in his life, and it was fake. He was
an aspiring philosopher of dubious potential,
very serious, but somehow lacking in

essential depth. He could have been
an adequate undertaker. It was not the first
time for either of them. It was a civil

service, with no music, few flowers.
Still, there was a slow and erratic tide
of champagne—corks shot clear into the trees.

And flashcubes, instant photos, some blurred
and some too revealing, cake slices that aren’t
what they were meant to be. The bride slept

through much of it, and never did we figure out
who was on whose team. I think the groom
meant it in the end when he said, “We never

thought anyone would come.” We were not the first
to arrive, nor the last to leave. Who knows,
it may all turn out for the best. And who

really cares about such special days, they
are not what we live for.

~James Tate                                                                            

Sunday, January 24, 2010

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died. I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.
So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.

~Pablo Neruda (Translated by Alfred Yankauer)                                     

Saturday, January 23, 2010

How Things Work

Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.
We’re completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go
Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.

~Gary Soto                                                                             

Friday, January 22, 2010

The Girl with Bees in her Hair

came in an envelope with no return address;
she was small, wore wrinkled dress of figured
cotton, full from neck to ankles, with a button
of bone at the throat, a collar of torn lace.
She was standing before a monumental house—
on the scale you see in certain English films:
urns, curved drives, stone lions, and an entrance far
too vast for any home. She was not of that place,
for she had a foreign look, and tangled black hair,
and an ikon, heavy and strange, dangling from
an oversize chain around her neck, that looked
as if some tall adult had taken it from his,
and hung it there as a charm to keep her safe
from a world of infinite harm that soon
would take him far from her, and leave her
standing, as she stood now—barefoot, gazing
without expression into distance, away
from the grandeur of that house, its gravel
walks and sculpted gardens. She carried a basket
full of flames, but whether fire or flowers
with crimson petals shading toward a central gold,
was hard to say—though certainly, it burned,
and the light within it had nowhere else
to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red
and burning glow, the only color in the scene.
The rest was done in grays, light and shadow
as they played along her dress, across her face,
and through her midnight hair, lively with bees.
At first they seemed just errant bits of shade,
until the humming grew too loud to be denied
as the bees flew in and out, as if choreographed
in a country dance between the fields of sun
and the black tangle of her hair.

                                                         Without warning
a window on one of the upper floors flew open—
wind had caught the casement, a silken length
of curtain filled like a billowing sail—the bees
began to stream out from her hair, straight
to the single opening in the high facade. Inside,
a moment later—the sound of screams.

The girl—who had through all of this seemed
unconcerned and blank—all at once looked up.
She shook her head, her mane of hair freed
of its burden of bees, and walked away,
out of the picture frame, far beyond
the confines of the envelope that brought her
image here—here, where the days grow longer
now, the air begins to warm, dread grows to
fear among us, and the bees swarm.

~Eleanor Wilner                                                                               

Thursday, January 21, 2010

My Second Marriage to my First Husband

We married for acceptance: to stall the nagging
married friends who wanted us
to do it there and then—
with them. In the downy wedlocked bed
we ask "Is there life after
one-day honeymoons to Kissamee Springs?
Was I all right?" The answers, woefully,
are no and no. And yes,

we lollygagged down the aisle, vowed
to forsake dallying, shilly-shallying, and cleave
only onto one another, to forever romp
in the swampy rumpus
room of our eccentricities: that sanctum
sanctorum where I sport
bedsocks and never rise
till noon. What did we know?
Did you know my love for animals
has always been acute? Perhaps in time
I will become a shepherdess, a jockey.

At the reception every table was adorned
with toilet tissue cy-
cloned into swans. When I unraveled one
to find the charm, the management
was shocked. Dismembering swans!

No bride had ever...And the prize, a little gizzard
of a ring, was disappointing. Oh Person,
was it worth it? Of course,
we fit at dinner parties. But as one part warbles
to be normal, another puts a spin on things.
I see you striving to frolic
in your steel-mesh tweeds as I model
chiffon voluptuaries the color of exhaust.

In the wedding album we end or commence
our revels. There we are! doing the cha-cha-cha
to the boom-chick-chick band
in our dyed-to-match togs.
We're getting fat
on the eats, foaming
white crumbs, "Honey" and "Dear"
cumbersome as live doves
on our tongues.

Bring squeezeboxes, gardenias,
a hybrid of the two. Congratulate us,
chums. Smile and freeze: our dimples stiffen
to resolute framed stares. How adult
we look! Our eyes burn
stoplights in the Instamatic squares.

~Alice Fulton                                                                                        

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A Real-Life Drama

This dog standing in the middle of the street, tail stiff, fur bushy with fear, and a pedigree rabbit,
its neck broken and bleeding beneath his paws,
might have been forgiven or simply taken away

and shot under different circumstances
and no one would have said much, except his owner
who’d gone out into the yard at the start
of the commotion, having been involved

at other times with the dog’s truancies, and yelled,
“Bosco, Bosco, goddamnit!” but unavailing,
and everyone understanding that once more Bosco
had been taken over by the dark corner of his nature.

But this other sentiment we shared as well: the man
Who’d raised the rabbit shouldn’t husband something
so rare and beautiful he couldn’t keep it
from the likes of Bosco.

~Michael Collier                                                                          

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

At the Galleria Shopping Mall

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,
there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;

one of them singing news about a far-off war,
one comparing the breast size of an actress from Hollywood

to the breast size of an actress from Bollywood.
And here is my niece Lucinda,

who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,
who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde

and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.
Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,

swinging a credit card like a scythe
through the meadows of golden merchandise.

Today is the day she stops looking at faces,
and starts assessing the labels of purses;

So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty
and raised and wrung out again and again.

And let us watch.
As the gods in olden stories

turned mortals into laurel trees and crows
to teach them some kind of lesson,

so we were turned into Americans
to learn something about loneliness.

~Tony Hoagland                                                                                 

Monday, January 18, 2010

A Shelter of Dolls

Perhaps it began with the ornaments -- fabric scraps
turned into mushrooms and teddy bears, flowers, birds, felt
storybook characters accurate down to the last
extra half-hour. You never saw such a tree. Or generosity,
how they would go to relatives, friends, neighbors just
over for coffee. Casual. As though right then
nothing else mattered. As though
this one didn't take more than a day to make,
production line in her living room all year long.

Or earlier, purpose like security going
before four children were grown -- or nearly, two
still at home when their step-father isn't
fighting with them (his own, she says, lie and steal), or they
aren't fighting their real father, thrown out of school --
their pictures in oils in the living room, forever small.

It's nobody's fault, she says, they're good kids,
they help with charities, Children's Services, church
bazaars she's always in charge of -- all summer, rummage sale
items in her garage, collecting like Saturday re-runs,
some things don't change all at once.
Ihe youngest has all the boys after her.

Myself, I remember an answer from church camp.
Thirteen, I asked why people grew up. To have
children, our group leader said, so they some day can have
their own children. All he left out
curing tomorrow like salt, the girl on the label
spilling it, each time smaller, her picture
within a picture within her own hands
smaller, smaller, smaller.

~Ingrid Wendt                                                               

Sunday, January 17, 2010

The History Teacher

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

~Billy Collins                                                                                          

Saturday, January 16, 2010

The Woman Who Loved Things

A woman finally learned how to love things, so things learned
how to love her too as she pressed herself to their shining sides,
their porous surfaces. She smoothed along walls until
walls smoothed along her too, a joy, a climax, this flesh
against plaster, the sweet suck of consenting molecules.

Sensitive men and women became followers, wrapping themselves
in violet, pasting her image over their fast hearts,
pressing against walls until walls came to appreciate
differences in molecules. This became a worship.
They became a love. A church. A cult. A way of being.

But, of course, it had to be: the woman's love kept growing
until she was loved by trees and appliances, from toasters
to natural obstacles, until her ceiling shook loose to send kisses,
sheets wound tight betwixt her legs, and floorboards broke free
of their nails, straining their lengths over her sleeping.

She awoke and drove out of town alone. In love, rocks flew
through her car windows, then whole hillsides slid, loosening
with desire. Her car shattered its shaft to embrace her,
but she ran from the wreckage, calling all the sweet things
as she waited in a field of strangely complacent daisies.

She spoke of love until losing her breath, and the things
trilled to feel that loss too, at last, sighing in thingness.
She fell down, and the things fell down around her. She cried
"Christ!" and the things cried "Christ!" in their thing-hearts
until everything living and unliving wonderfully collided.

~Cathleen Calbert                                                  

Friday, January 15, 2010

Film Noir: Train Trip out of Metropolis

We're headed for empty-headedness
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Montana, Nevada,
states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.
We're taking the train so we can see into the heart
of the heart of America framed in the windows' cool
oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses
with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;
we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over
ponds and meadows. We've never seen a meadow.
Now, we want to wade into one--up to our chins in the grassy
welter--the long reach of our vision grabbing up great
handfuls and armloads of scenery, our eyes at the clouds'
white sale, our eyes at the bargain basement giveaway
of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half
of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves
like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding
the whole great story together.

And then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station,
and the scenery begins to creep forward--a friendly but timid tribe.
The ramshackle shapes of Main, the old-fashioned cars dozing
at the ribbon of curb, the mongrel hound loping across a stretch
of unpaved road, the medals of the Lions and Chamber of Commerce
pinned on the town's chest, the street lights on their long stems,
the little park, the trolley, the faint bric-a-brac of park stuff:
bum on the bench, boy with the ball come closer and closer.

Then the pleasantly sinister swell of the soundtrack tapers
to a long wail. The noise of a train gathers momentum
and disappears into the distance leaving us stranded here,
and our names are strolling across the landscape in the crisply
voluminous script of the opening credits, as though these were
our signatures on the contract, as though we were the authors of this story.

~Lynn Emanuel                            

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Play Again

Late in 1962, New York newspapers reported the story of a nine-year-old child being raped on a roof and hurled twenty stories to the ground.

I draw near to the roof's edge
and seek someone to lift
and hurl me out into vacant air.
I want to turn over and over
rapidly in my plunge, my mouth
open to scream but air rushing
upwards jams my throat.
I am seeking the peace
I never once gave up on
and this is the final way to find it. The living
share me among them. They taste
me on the ground, they taste me
in the air descending. They taste
me screaming, nine years old.
I have playmates
and I leave behind my skull
in their dreams, hands to mouths.
It is because they have no help,
as if to hint to them the way,
if they would understand.
When we played it was to love each other
in games. Play again and love me
until I really die, when you are old
on a flight of stairs.

~David Ignatow                                                                                                   

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward

Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love. At first hunger is not wrong.
The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded
down starch halls with the other unnested throng
in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head
moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong.
But this is an institution bed.
You will not know me very long.

The doctors are enamel. They want to know
the facts. They guess about the man who left me,
some pendulum soul, going the way men go
and leave you full of child. But our case history
stays blank. All I did was let you grow.
Now we are here for all the ward to see.
They thought I was strange, although
I never spoke a word. I burst empty
of you, letting you learn how the air is so.
The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me
and I turn my head away. I do not know.

Yours is the only face I recognize.
Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in.
Six times a day I prize
your need, the animals of your lips, your skin
growing warm and plump. I see your eyes
lifting their tents. They are blue stones, they begin
to outgrow their moss. You blink in surprise
and I wonder what you can see, my funny kin,
as you trouble my silence. I am a shelter of lies.
Should I learn to speak again, or hopeless in
such sanity will I touch some face I recognize?

Down the hall the baskets start back. My arms
fit you like a sleeve, they hold
catkins of your willows, the wild bee farms
of your nerves, each muscle and fold
of your first days. Your old man’s face disarms
the nurses. But the doctors return to scold
me. I speak. It is you my silence harms.
I should have known; I should have told
them something to write down. My voice alarms
my throat. “Name of father—none.” I hold
you and name you bastard in my arms.

And now that’s that. There is nothing more
that I can say or lose.
Others have traded life before
and could not speak. I tighten to refuse
your owling eyes, my fragile visitor.
I touch your cheeks, like flowers. You bruise
against me. We unlearn. I am a shore
rocking you off. You break from me. I choose
your only way, my small inheritor
and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose.
Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.

~Anne Sexton                                                                                        

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

To Santa Claus and Little Sisters

Once,
On yellow paper, with green lines, he wrote a poem,
And called it "Chops",
Because that was the name of his dog,
And that’s what it was all about.
And the teacher gave him an "A"
And a gold star,
And his mother hung it on the kitchen door,
And read it to all his aunts.
That was the year his sister was born,
With tiny toenails and no hair,
And Father Tracy took them to the zoo
And let them sing on the bus.
And his mother and father kissed a lot
And the girl around the corner sent him a Christmas card
Signed with a row of x's.
And his father always tucked him in at night,
And he was always there to do it.

Once,
On white paper, with blue lines, he wrote another poem.
And he called it "Autumn"
Because that was the name of a season,
And that’s what it was all about.
And the teacher gave him an "A"
And told him to write more clearly.
And his mother didn’t hang it on the kitchen door
Because the door
Had just been painted.
That was the year his sister got glasses,
With black frames and thick lenses.
And the kids told him why father and mother
Kissed a lot,
And that Father Tracy smoked cigars
And left butts on the pews,
And the girl around the block laughed
When he went to see Santa Claus at Macy’s.
And his father stopped tucking him in bed at night,
And got mad when he cried for him to.

Once,
On paper torn from his notebook, he wrote another poem,
And he called it "Question Marked Innocence",
Because that was the name of his grief
And that’s what it was all about.
And the professor gave him an "A"
And a strange and steady look.
And his mother never hung it on the door
Because he never let her see it.
That year he found his sister necking on the back porch
And his parents never kissed, or even smiled.
And he forgot how the end of the "Apostle’s Creed" went,
And Father Tracy died.
And the girl around the block wore too much make-up
That made him cough when he kissed her,
But he kissed her anyway.

Once,
At 3 a.m., he tucked himself in bed,
His father snoring soundly.
He tried another poem, on the back of a pack of matches,
And he called it "absolutely nothing"
Because that’s what it was all about.
And he gave himself an "A"
And a slash on each damp wrist,
And hung it on the bathroom door,
Because he couldn’t reach the kitchen.

~Anonymous (written by a 15-year-old boy two years before he committed suicide)