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our students paid

Jason Baltazar

“our students paid for the campus experience”

august on its back
breathing smoke,
daydreaming
calendar’s end,

counting unsung
communions,
these dreams yet
untranslated.

making plans
as though final,
crossing fingers
to meet september, 

and october,
and my own child
whose only name 
is tomorrow

Writer’s Statement

Whether or not to risk one's own life, and for what, should always be a choice.

And yet in boardrooms–for financial reasons, for political reasons, and because of the inherent power imbalance between administrators in office suites and those of us walking a school's halls every day, that do the actual labor on both sides of the classroom that sustains departments–potentially fatal choices are made for us.

Those of us risking our lives, not by choice or by oath but by compulsion, are just that: lives.

Not numbers. Not abstract terms like "student," "teacher," or "employee." People with constellations of loved ones around us whom we cherish, are cherished by; people whose very presence in this context indicates achievements, aspirations, expertise, all of which benefit countless others in communities around us because, as the virus itself has demonstrated, we are all connected whether we like it or not.

Each one of us is a person who imagines a tomorrow for ourselves, and in that space of possibility has invested our greatest hopes.

Unquantifiable. Irreplaceable.

No, there isn't any guarantee we will contract this virus, or having contracted it become symptomatic, or then be hospitalized, or then suffer the as yet unknown lifetime consequences of long COVID, or die. Nor is there any guarantee we won't.

As the choice to take such risks has been made for us, so should the consequences fall upon those who made it.

about the writer