Why Do I Need to Know This Stuff

by Edie Meade

Homeschool curriculum planning.

Fifteen tabs I never wanted to open 

ossify into emotional stalactites 

at the top of everything I do. Responsibility, 

inadequacy, pandemic alienation. So much guilt.

I never wanted to be this owl-eyed 

stay-at-home mom painting affirmation rocks, 

stamping my feet to show

how oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.

Nobody wants to think about the long-term.

What will become of my boy, who changes 

his favorite color from blue to yellow because 

he wants so badly to ride a school bus, and cries 

because he’s learned what I mean by “we’ll see”? 

//

Cave tour in a backroad hole, our guide a teenaged girl 

who knows a few things about life in the darkness. 

Call it a fieldtrip, the homeschool curriculum recommends.

Everything is a fieldtrip when you never leave the house.

My boy cries. “My eyes don’t work down here.” 

My own eyes open so wide they ache, compensating, 

as if I could overpower the rock. We shine our light

on bats and lizards and stalagmites ruined by skin oil,

which is another evidence of life, but not the kind we want.

I ask what kind of fish are these, translucent 

and eyeless, in a pool lit by treble light. The girl blinks

at me like I’m stupid and says, “Cave fish.” 

I look them up for myself at home, modeling learning – 

school is learning how to learn, learning how to question –

but Latin names slide off my brain like frog jelly.

I’m too ignorant for this.

//

Two nieces undergo emergency tonsillectomies,

relatives suffer emergency room panic 

over stomach pain, fevers that cause delirium 

and projectile vomiting, a new bug, 

some stomach bug going around. Every dance recital,

every soccer match kicks up a surprise infestation.

Every surface crawls with unidentified bugs

and only germ theory has scurried under the baseboards.

//

Prisoners of war wait in caves full of coffins 

full of ants. Hypothesis, experiment, and proof of life. 

Hostages lose value if they die or if they are forgotten, 

which might as well be the same thing.

“Why should I care?” A good teacher anticipates 

student skepticism. “Why do I need to know this stuff?”

//

Twenty quadrillion ants on Earth,

twenty million billion. I tell my boy to imagine 

two-and-a-half million ants for every man, woman, 

child. His eyes moon, as though he could envision it.

Over the sidewalk crack’s ant superhighway 

I chalk zero after zero, and call it a lesson.