About Me

Hi, I'm Harper Lee Simmons. It's pronounced Har-peh, because my dad's from the south. He's a foreign service agent from the US; my mom's a professor from Morocco. I grew up dividing my time between Rabat, Casablanca, and the countryside, with occasional trips to France. (I speak Arabic, French, and, yes, English.) I was born in Morocco but spent my first year or two in the States to get some fancy medical treatments. Mom and I and my brother and sister usually hang out at home while Dad's away on business. I have a younger brother, Will, and a younger sister, Charlotte. Dad named us all after his "heroes of literature": Nelle Harper Lee, William Shakespeare, and Charlotte Bronte. Mom and us kids are Muslim and Dad's a Baptist. He met my mother on an assignment and hasn't been able to get his heart away from Morocco since. Now I'm in the States attending a boarding school. I got detained after a fifty-state whirlwind tour, probably because of my religion. Living at "home" has been difficult to adjust to, but I'm getting there. With some help from my wonderful teacher and new friends, my United States citizenship has become something tangible. Oh, and I'm a poet. Yeah, I might not be your typical American Girl... but I think that's something I can live with.

19 February 2009

High School

horrible
is most often the adjective
used to describe
those often decrepit
(especially the basement grey-brick-style)
halls, packed with bodies,
a giant cattle car where
we push and shove
just to get where we all need to be
and sneak away
to get our daily smoke.

however,
i found that our halls
were cleanly, almost shining
and the principals
were obnoxiously good at breaking up fights
we yearned to witness
and some cheered on
and only the freshmen
ever prevented that all-important duty
of getting to class,
and only once
did a trashcan explode
in a storm of teenage angst
and rebellion, in the bathroom
after school, the one
where the cheerleaders
never went to change into their uniforms
and all the bored kids in math
went to skip class

but more importantly,
i came to observe
the most important thing
was that the hallway led off
into a room packed into the back of the school
with its own miniature
hallway of anticipation,
the last lap of the marathon,
columbus seeing land from the ship,
or sometimes only rarely
on mad days, decision days,
the walk from the prison
to the courtroom
except this courtroom always voted innocent,
even when the world bounced
on its axis
and we both thought
it would fall off entirely.

i cannot find
a single adjective
to describe the horror
or the pleasure
that was high school,
but i can define the one person
who made it anything but
the hellhole
most kids make it out to be,
for that room off that hallway
is and always will be
home.

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