Jake Fournier
Punishment Bag
Rosa would wait for me at the station
“pink umbrella, closed (or open)”
and I’d settle into life at the Walls,
Les Mureaux, Parisian exurb,
a 90% North African ghetto where
I’d model English at the aptly named
Lycée François Villon and, in my free time,
memorize the medieval ironist’s verses, thrilled
to understand when he described, for instance,
a winter so brutal that the wolves
fed on the wind. The school lay
on the other side of a Seuss-like park.
Loraxian trees lined overcultivated walks,
and to the north from squat smokestacks
untold picturesque pollutants billowed
constantly across the open fields where,
I’d been warned, the previous language
assistant used periodically to get fleeced.
The omnipresent “get”—the first
verb I noticed that always required
a more precise transliteration.
Whether to receive, befall, or fetch,
we put it “in tutte le salse,” Rosa said.
Petite and commanding, my superior
allowed herself precisely one cigarette per
lunch. On first arriving from Tuscany, she’d spent
weeks on end with her head wedged
in vinyl clamshells at the terminals
of the BNF—the only library I know
with an archival forest—repeating key
expressions like “N’importe quoi” and
“Les fuyards montent le fleuve,” distracted
by the Nouvelle Heloïse within, kicking her ribs.
She told me all this in a subzero apartment
in Verneuil sur Seine, standing at the range, sliding
the pinkest entrecôte I’ll ever see around
a pan of electrically-heated grease, pining
for a lost astronomer who cared “more
about the stars than me.”
Don’t think for a second I was diligent
when I say I discovered the plan
for the compelling “pedagogical instrument”
from which this poem derives its title
in the secondary ELS literature. It was the only
good idea in the slim free pamphlet
my 30-second Google search for training
yielded me. I’d been assigned ten sections.
Each of the regular English classes across
four levels was required to join me twice
a week for native conversation. Blessedly
a quarter never came. I mean that I went
to the assigned rooms for an entire year
and sat at the front desk wondering how
many nanograms of gold were buried
in the unnecessarily sleek machine that screened
me from the empty seats while somewhere
in the labyrinthine complex the truants
wandered undetected. Flashing in a blank
Word document, the caret marked 36-
hundred seconds, then I’d stand up
and leave. Either the regular faculty failed
to inform them or, more likely, after
the first missed class, the kids and I made
a tacit pact: They did not want to meet.
I was terrified to teach. They’d smoke clopes
out back, and I’d write (in theory) the poems
that would make my reputation. I might’ve told
someone the first month, fixed it, corralled
the missing sections. After that, the embarrassment
of a confession would have killed me. Between
empty meetings, I’d duck away to the boiler
room housing the industrial washer where, almost
daily, I did my meager laundry, and sit huddled
with my legs crossed, mortally anxious
I’d have to engage the custodial staff
in my remedial French, praying
they’d spare me the necessity.
As for the rest, a few enterprising pupils, God
bless them, wanted to learn English. That’s why
it pained me, through the early months, that
an interchangeable procession of 16-year-old
standups with names like Guy, Rachid,
and Maurice spouted off incessantly
in an argot-dense vernacular as beautiful
as it was unintelligible to me. They practiced
their impromptu insult comedy at my expense,
and who could blame them? I once
while relocating to escape an extensive blood-tinted
ceiling leak referred to the affected classroom
as “la chambre”—the bedroom—and repeatedly
insisted that I had just visited Rosa’s ass—
my mispronunciation of “Rosa’s class”—
to their immense adolescent glee. I lived,
it’s worth noting, gratis, in an uninsulated
rector set apartment behind the school, across
the hall from the school chef, who I along
with everyone found in public the sweetest
man imaginable, but whose frequent, sometimes
frightening domestic disputes soon sharpened
my ear to the 9th- and 10th-graders’
comparably extracurricular vocabulary.
Two groundskeepers, early on, assembled
me a bedframe, a box-slat affair unheard of here
in the States and, for all I know, uncommon
there also because, in their confusion, the workmen
clipped the strap securing the slats
to the head and baseboard. Now
through the night the teak panels supporting
the wafer-thin mattress inched together until
inevitably, just before sunrise, my feet crashed
into the open pulpwood structure. By late
October, in the early hours, my breath fogged
in the lamplight and, though I complained
of the broken radiators to the principal, fixes
at François Villon came only “grâce au système D.”
I slept in sweats and, when I woke, did sit ups
to keep warm. I’d gotten practice from the evening
calisthenics that the lithe futch gym teacher
held weekly for the aging faculty, and, so impressed
was I with her tendency to bound down
the school steps two at once with a “Hup, hup,
hup, hup,” that I began imitating her on my Escherian
descents into the Paris metro. I might have passed
the whole winter in constant motion if it weren’t
that, come mid-November, the giant Auchan across
the park stocked a row of 25€ space heaters. I toted
one home over the vacant pathways, humming
Rimbaud, picturing the blue nights of summer.
I like to pretend the bag the heater came in
is the bag that became it, because soon after
I gathered up the miscellaneous items
propping up or expelled from my mean
existence—a pocket calculator missing
its back shell, an orphaned rook, cheap
aviators, two miniature plush koalas—the idea
was to keep a constantly cycling assortment
of texturally and contextually distinct objects ready
to hand so that the subjected troublemakers
never twice withdrew the same fetish. Here’s
how it worked: I filled a black plastic
grocery sack, the punishment bag, with refuse
and trinkets, and when my charges spoke
other than English I instructed them
to remain seated while I held the bag
above their head. They were to reach in
almost to the elbow and, without naming it,
describe whatever their hand grasped. “It’s zoft
and made of cloth. You wear it . . . on your foot.”
Only when the class identified the thing could
the subject pull the sock out for all to see. “This time,”
I’d say, “the sock is clean. Push your luck
and next time it will be dirty.” It’s possible
I stretched this joke too far when one particularly
prim and guarded junior selected a cardboard
tube with a few dangling scraps of toilet sheet.
Needless to say, the method backfired. They
clamored for more. A few enterprising
polyglots even deliberately regressed
to secure their opportunity.
“It is ’ard. It is ’airy. It grows on ze tree.”
Half palm himself, a slender boy named Toni drew
the coconut. “Oh my God. Can I keep it for ma mère?
She uses zis for une soupe délicieuse.”
Did any expect, I wonder, that their future
punishments might also take this shape?
“As, barring perhaps the ultimate,” I wrote in
an early draft, “our punishments tend to be,
their punishment would be discovery.” But
I’ve come to suspect death won’t be different.
Each death, a lot whittled by the life
encasing it, sits until the moment when, keen
or obtunded, conscious or asleep, what’s
left of our sense engulfs it, so that our
last living act is learning. Some are spiked like durian
and rupture at their testing, but all, whether
slick and metallic or softly downed, sap
our last heat. With poems, since we’re now
explicit, I’ve often felt similar, like I was reaching
into a bag of mystical geodes, alien
organs, even living entities, angels
or shades whose subglottic existence
it fell on me to translate. To the elbow
and past it I’ve plunged my arm into
this insubstantial purse. Less than air, its
immateriality flickers like tones of fuchsia
in the smooth interior of certain oysters
It obscures and aggregates the extradimensional
socks and coconuts that shred the net
of English. But as to who has summoned me
and to what end and for which of my trespasses
or faults, I cannot pretend to answer.
Jake Fournier is an EMT living in Albuquerque, NM. His book, Punishment Bag, is forthcoming from UNMP.