Grading Rubric for Children of Divorce (Julie Sheehan).
MECHANICS: Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors
“I like snaks,” he wrote to filibuster
a blank school day, his cobras coiled back home
in a lunchbox. Six seemed much too young to master
the silent e, an extra chromosome
slithering like subtext at the ends
of sense, and who could fathom -ght?
There’s violins, and then there’s violence,
two phone numbers, no bus some days, say please,
start at the top for l, n, b, and q,
but e starts in the middle, twists on its spine,
gets trampled by horses, beggarly as Pew
in Chapter Five. “I hope he dies,” my kind
boy hissed at story hour. He didn’t know
he’d known so well that Pew would perish, a plot
point drawn like an e already in death throes
before the horses come, as afterthought.
We read, Pew died, he sobbed. “Mom, I like TV
where you don’t care about the characters.”
I put down Treasure Island. He asked, “Where’s
dead?” but meant another word, without the e.
STYLE: Little or no sentence fluency; many repetitions; incorrect vocabulary; author does not communicate enthusiasm
For rote, read rot
For dead, read dad
For knotty, read naughty
For Hades, read had
For The It, read tithe
For heat, read hate
For write, read writhe
For meat, read mate
Desire is reside
Denude is endure
To seek is to hide
Fraction is fracture
ORGANIZATION: Introduction, body, and conclusion do not follow format
Miss Deference scores a line: The principal
is Mr. Long but he isn’t long, he’s short.
No one’s tuned to hear her hit the tact
nicely on the head. So unlike her,
said no one, as Greek gods bicker, social studies
of exclamation points. Under her desk
in wads of molded gum, her pencil pokes
the obverse of nipples or puts out Grecian eyes.
Is anyone under the radar under duress?
She’s testing blunt-nosed scissors. When they cut
her arms, she’ll starve and purge to get more edge,
less form. She’s cleared for future vanishing points
where Ares and Harpina can howl Olympic
obscenities in zero relation to her.
CONTENT: Does not address the essay topic
What I’m trying to say is that when you divide
something in half, you divide it into two
equal parts, yes, and Dennis wants to share
his snacks equally with Sara. Draw a line
on each food to divide it in half, they said,
so I bisected the apple, the cheese cube, the pizza
slice, the ice cream cone with my fat black
crayon, but when they said, “Now color
each half differently,” I could not do it. What
gods have joined, let no one put asunder.
——-
Julie Sheehan. Parnassas: poetry in review, volume 31, nos. 1 and 2, pp. 307-309. Please don’t sue me.
