Student From Hell

   by Chris Dietz
		
		 
Rasha sits in the back
and I ask if everything is ok
and she says she never learned division this way
and I say ‘I’ll work with you’ & she thanks me & almost smiles
and I say ‘where you from’ & she says ‘Haifa’ then she shakes her head
and looks away. ‘It was hard,’ she says.
I go, ’I’m sorry’. She says, ‘Not your fault.’

Rasha sits in the back
and when I noticed her on the 1st day
I saw 80 lbs of gristle
with black, wiry hair & a crooked smile
I saw everyone kept away from her

When we talked, her one black eyebrow
seemed rapacious
and I glanced away
at her thin arms
as big around as a schoolgirl’s
wound with wiry lashes

She was from the streets of Haifa
when she told the class she’d been a slave
in Dubai
for a few years, and it was a good experience
slavery was a job, like anything else, she said
and shrugged

The black students, men & women
were incensed, couldn’t believe a human being
could say such a thing
but no one argued with Rasha

I said, ‘you must be very brave to have gone through that’
now she was embarrassed & hating me,
Finally, her sergeant told me the story
she was in Iraq, in the Green Zone
and an Iraqi man had been hassling, hustling her
he knew she was Israeli, he knew she’d been a slave
so he came on her in a park in the Green Zone
and grabbed her arms & pushed her into a secluded spot
she got an arm free but no weapon
but she did have a nail clipper
and she managed to flick out the tiny nail file blade
and she punched that little blade into the Iraqi’s throat
kept punching it in 
bam bam bam
with that little rough blade
until she must have hit his carotid
and he erupted all over her face
her sergeant said, ‘she could kill you with a pencil
Where I am most of the time….'