Luke Johnson

Mothers murmur,

Children chatter,

People settle,

And all is calm.

Then the doors burst open,

And in comes the noise,

Out come the groans.

We invade the silence of the theater,

We tear through the walls,

All the while screaming:

Hello. We are American.

Hello. We are American.

Hello. We are American.

We are here to talk.

We are here to gab.

We are here for us.

With our "lolz", with our "<3"s, with our ironically fractured grammar.

And we three pause, Swimmies in a sea of red.

We scan our school, our eyes wandering over the scales and gills of our own

Cacophonous kind.

And we three sink, to the bottom of the beast,

Hoping to scrape by the piercing gazes of the walls around us.

As I burrow into my red plush seat,

At the verge of a sorry sight,

108 students boiling over into the sanctity of their neighbors' silence,

I make eye contact with the outside.

Before he turns his head back,

I attempt to compensate for our travesty of sound.

But he retreats, and thankfully burrows into his pocket of the room,

The one that was reserved for him, for somebody that would respect its

existence, in his or her own, soft way.

And we three remain, enveloped by the verbal detritus of our surroundings,

Accepting the salt water that pours down our throats.

At least we know it's there.