Life skills. When Janine was in high school, they’d called it home economics. The curriculum had hardly changed—some sewing, some cooking (really the preparation of prepackaged convenience foods), and a little math—but home ec, the principal said, had a girly and old-fashioned ring to it, and the students were no longer the same perky future housewives who had been Janine’s classmates. No, Janine’s students were bored, gum-snapping girls, delinquent boys who needed one more class to graduate, tenth-graders who could not read or pronounce the word ingredients. These were students bound for work in fast food restaurants and big box stores, some of them bound for deportation. And every year, more of them: twenty-eight in a classroom meant to hold twenty-two, thirty sometimes. Janine knew the word whore in several languages and kept a stack of detention slips signed and filled out on her desk. “Gross disrespect” she’d written under “reason” on every one.

One day last fall, the principal came to speak to her about the frequency of her detention referrals—didn’t she think it would be better to work on her relationships with the students? He was a reasonable, maddeningly patient man who had taught for exactly one year.

“You mean,” Janine said, “I should let them—”

“Not let them,” the principal said. “Work with them.”

That was when Janine started writing the poems. At first, she’d simply flipped the detention slips over and started writing. Someone used the smooth green jersey intended for frog-shaped pillows to make a pot leaf? She wrote a poem. Someone used the hot dogs, meant to be baked into pigs in blankets, for lewd gestures? Poem. Someone cussed, talked over her lessons, texted, or passed notes? Poem.

The students had thought she was writing detention slips, and they would wait for her to hand them over so they could suck their teeth and roll their eyes at her. But she’d merely stuffed the slips into her top desk drawer and continued with the lesson: this is how to remove a seam, this is how to season a pan, this is how to extinguish a grease fire.

“What you doin’ with them slips, Ms. Gray?” asked a boy who had spent most of Life Skills I in detention. He had passed—that seemed to be the point of life skills, everyone passed—and was back for more, as two of the classes made one math credit. He eyed her desk nervously. “You savin’ ’em up or something?”

Janine had shrugged. “Just writing something to myself,” she said.

He held out his hand. “If I’m gonna have detention, I’ll take it now,” he said.

“But I haven’t given you detention,” Janine said. “I was only writing.”

“Not ’cause of me?”

“I didn’t say that,” Janine said.