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      April 13, 2022On a Square on a ScreenSara Beck

      She is animated in her Zoom square
      her hands moving,
      her eyes urging us to stay with her,
      to understand
      the vocabulary of the election
      in American Sign Language.
      candidate. election. vote. party. republican. democrat. independent. win.
      It is Election Day 2020, and my brain is crowded with worry
      and cannot make room to process new words taught by a face on a square
      on a screen
      but we don’t get it, so she spells it out with her fingers, slowly
      for those of us used to signing with children
      who speak an ASL more about impressions of combined letters
      than precise spellings
      we tend to get so hung up on the pesky individual letters—
      pausing to wonder if that p was a k
      that we miss the rest of the story and so
      democrat and republican are words that I don’t quite catch.
      When she calls on each of us,
      waiting the several seconds it takes us to
      catch our sign name on her hands
      in her square on our screens,
      when she asks: WHICH-PARTY-YOU-SUPPORT?
      I do not know what to say.
      She pauses, she is patient, though I don’t know why
      because as a group, we are painfully slow
      but she knows that practice makes progress
      so she throws me a bone, she says
      I-SUPPORT-REPUBLICAN-PARTY-YOU?
      WHICH-PARTY-YOU-SUPPORT?
      And I’m thrown off
      because Trump?
      and Stella?
      I can hardly believe it, but then it occurs to me that
      I don’t even know those words, really,
      and maybe she didn’t say that at all and
      even if she did, would it change how I feel
      about this woman who teaches my nephew,
      who teaches me, and my mom, and my dad,
      and my brother-in-law
      for free
      or maybe just for the feeling of knowing that
      one Deaf child she cares about will have a family
      who speaks his language,
      even if they can’t precisely tell
      the difference between the words
      republican and democrat?
      I am a careful student, as a rule,
      but I leave without learning the difference
      because tonight, I don’t want to see it.
      I don’t want to linger on the difference because
      maybe if I don’t know how to describe it,
      it will disappear
      and we can just be people
      learning each other’s languages
      from a square on a screen.

      from #75 - Spring 2022

      Sara Beck

      “My nephew is eight years old, and he is my inspiration for learning American Sign Language. I’ve learned bits and pieces from lots of places—my sister (his mom), TikTok, Instagram, a couple of college courses, loads of books, and during the long year of the pandemic, a brilliant Deaf teacher over Zoom. I wrote this poem to capture a moment in all its contradictory glory, and I share it with gratitude for the messiness of human connection.”