By Ari Rojas
Art by Sophia Gregorace
He’s got this chicken scratch handwriting.
Hieroglyphics would’ve been more clear.
Squinting won’t help, so I cave.
“What did I miss last class?”
He’s eager and all too ready.
He attended class; he took the notes.
He says he’ll catch me up on what I missed last class.
Men model the passage of time,
Or so that’s his story.
“Just think about it,” he says.
What luck, these men are the products
Of some kind of divine intervention.
“Look at the creators,
Zeus and God, just to name a few.
It’s like every origin story under the sun.”
“But Gaia!” I almost interject.
“Then there are the prophets:
Mathew, Mark, Luke, Peter, John, James,”
I’m looking at you.
“There’s the philosophers too:
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
A dynasty in their own right.”
“Wollstonecraft,” I’d like to add, but don’t.
“Most importantly, there are heroes.
Each born possessing greatness
Destined to dispel his generation’s
greatest calamity.”
His favorite is Churchill,
He’s even got a mini-bust of him in his dorm.
He got it last summer at a museum.
Wholeheartedly, he christens them Ubermenschs.
I half-expect his search history to read
“How to become an ubermensch”
I sigh and let him finish.
Here’s to the half-hour I won’t get back.
Here’s to the forgotten ladies of history.