LaWanda Walters – The Linguistics Professor

Walters LE P&W 4 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024

The Linguistics Professor, poem by LaWanda Walters.


The Linguistics Professor

(A short story in verse)

“My bar is somewhat further down the street.”
—Anthony Hecht, “Third Avenue in Sunlight”

I’m wiped out. I’m thirsty.
I’m gonna go get a beer, said the linguistics
professor. Let’s go get a beer.
This was in Ballantine Hall at Indiana,
“Mother Bear’s” just across the road.

I had been in line, waiting to talk to him,
but he kept talking to the two male students.
It wasn’t like they’d gotten there first.
It was the way he managed to arrange things.
And similarly, he arranged his words to sound

like no big deal, let’s go next door to talk.
I can’t talk to another student without a beer.
That way. That’s how he said it, how I
took it. But when we were walking to his car
I must have said something like, “Oh, I don’t

mind walking across the road.” There was a hedge,
but everybody stepped through or over it.
He said he had some other place in mind.
And we started driving. We left the old part
of Bloomington, and I thought, oh, are we going

to some bar at the mall? I was feeling funny, then,
but I didn’t want to sound like I didn’t trust him—
after all, he was my professor—I was planning
on getting my Ph.D. and you were required
to take linguistics for that. He hadn’t answered

that question I’d stood in line for. Oh my,
the view was getting boring, crew-cut yards,
ugly little sixties houses with their swing
sets rusting and the cookie-cutter streets
some builder’d planned—right-angled

corners, squared-off little blocks.
I knew there were chain restaurants
on the highway going out of town,
but we kept turning onto one small street
after the next. How does Let’s go GET

a beer signify wandering a subdivision?
Dante with squares instead of circles.
I knew if I asked him why,
it would make the worst come true.
It’s when Red Riding Hood questions

the wolf that he tears off her grandmother’s
bonnet. I could not push him to expose
his motive. I’d escaped a violent marriage.
I chatted to—what, cheer him up?
I’d heard he had lost his tenure,

and that was why he acted so arbitrary
in class. We turned into one of those
tic-tac-toe driveways. We got out
and he opened the trunk of his car.
There was a case of beer. So he thought

a grad student in English, taking classes in
linguistics and deconstructionism,
wouldn’t notice the gap between get
a beer and come to my house and drink
some warm beer, little girl?

Here we were walking through his garage
and I was clinging to the fantasy he merely
wanted me to meet his wife. Instead,
in the kitchen just the hum of the refrigerator,
alphabet magnets holding photos of children

with their mother stuck underneath, slanting
and curling. When I asked, he said the kids
and their mother were visiting someone.
“Oh, I guess you wanted to have the beers
here,” I said, trying to make sense of things.

Yes, he answered, monosyllabic
as a madman, and it was then I confessed
that I didn’t actually like the taste
of beer. (I’d planned on a gin and tonic
when we went into “Mother Bear’s”).

He must have been delighted when I asked,
“Say, do you have any gin”?
For the first time he smiled at me. He did,
indeed, have gin. And so we proceeded
from there. We walked into the living room,

me with my hefty gin and tonic and ice
as if that might suit for armor.
We both sat down on the couch
and had some kind of desultory
conversation for a while.

And then I had a saving thought.
Enunciating clearly, remembering
advice from some old drama class,
I mentioned that I’d forgotten
I had told someone I’d go to a late

party tonight. Oh, really?
asked the wolf. What time are you supposed
to be there? “Ten,” I said.
Ten? he repeated. “Yes, it’s for a friend
who is having to take this grueling test.”

He kept trying. That seems like
a pretty late party for a weekday.
He tried, but by that time I had the image
in my head—it was neon green, blinking
like the numbers on a digital clock.

And after what seemed like enough
small talk in his living room,
gulping gin, saying yes to one more,
I stood up and said, “I really hate to,
but I know I need to get back.”

For that party? he asked.
“Yes,” I said. Then he made
one of two moves on me. He placed
his hands on my shoulders as if
he might be planning to choke me,

but then he just shook me gently—
as if he had been joking the whole time.
After that he took me to my place.
I had to hug him in the car, of course—
I’ve blocked out whether this

linguistics professor stuck his tongue
in my mouth when he kissed me.
In the textbook for the class, I’d learned
the words fricative and plosive,
how the tongue must touch

the roof of the mouth to say certain words.
He waited until I got up to the lit porch
and drove away. I felt so grateful
I thought I’d misunderstood something.
At my next class with him I held my hand

up, eager to continue being a good student.
He never called on me. He looked straight
over my head. Then I decided
I’d been in danger. I knew
I had to drop his course before I received

a withdrawal “failing.” I decided I’d get
my M.F.A. in poetry instead of my Ph.D.,
even though I understood the linguistics
book—I’d even found a mistake in it,
which is what I’d wanted to ask him about

that day. I was advised to go to his office
with a withdrawal slip. I was scared,
but he did sign it. Nevertheless,
at Christmas break, back in Cincinnati,
my grades arrived in the mail and then I knew

what he was. An F instead of “withdrawal
passing.” So there was the wolf, disclosed.
The head of the department walked
to the Registrar himself to change the grade.
That’s how I came to be a poet.


© LaWanda Walters

LaWanda Walters earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Nine Mile, Radar Poetry, Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The American Journal of Poetry, Laurel Review, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Alligator Juniper, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, poet John Philip Drury.

6 Replies to “LaWanda Walters – The Linguistics Professor”

  1. That was a hard way to get there, but we were all very pleased to have you in the MFA program. A real star. Knowing nothing, of course, of that part of your past. Congratulations to you and your great spirit. Roger

    1. Dear Roger,
      And you were the opposite of the professor (Randy Parker, I think was his name)— you were a great, generous, professor of poetry. You are one of my favorite teachers ever. You and Philip Appleman and Mary Burgan and James Naremore. I am keeping this note forever because you called me a star. Thank you, brilliant poet and conscientious and good friend. La Wanda. Say hello to Dorian (sp?) for me. Take care!

  2. The telling is wonderfully compelling, building suspense so concisely, and the art of it so smoothly detailed. I loved this short story in unobtrusive verse.

    1. Dear Stephen, your words mean so much. I admire your great and lyrical poems. They seem to hover just above as they speak— they are surreal and visual.

      I very much appreciate your words on my “ telling.” Very honored. LaWanda

      1. Dear LaWanda, I’m honored by your comments about my writing, or making. Thank you. Btw, I hope to have a new book ready in late fall/ early winter. A “New and Selected Poems,” its complete title to be determined. Cheers.

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