By Matthew Williams

My students wear the name Nirvana and don’t know the band.
I didn’t know Kurt Cobain chose the name for its pretty sound
and, when I was younger, revered him as a tortured genius
until my brother found my mother unconscious
and all the medicine bottles empty. They say
he didn’t want the band’s name to sound angry.
One of my students who loves his Nirvana shirt
lost his mother. He stands and shouts at everyone
and no one and pushes out the classroom door. Despite
my mother becoming a self-avowed Buddhist who listens
to Thích Nhất Hạnh audiobooks and smokes marijuana
for chronic nausea and pain, I still know little of Nirvana
beyond what I’ve gleaned from a few movies and books:
transcendent detachment, cosmic oneness, unbeing.
And yet, with what little I knew, after
the bell rang, after the students
moved through the long hallways
that shook then stilled
as they emptied of their laughter,
I looked for him. I did.
I looked for that boy. 

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Matthew Williams is a teacher and poet from Sacramento, CA. He earned an MFA from NYU and received a Galway Kinnell Memorial Scholarship from The Community of Writers. His poems have appeared in Mantis, Blood Orange Review, The Banyan Review, California Quarterly, Clade Song, as part of The Center for Book Arts Poetry Broadside Reading Series, and elsewhere. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for No, Dear magazine and lives with his husband in Brooklyn where he teaches in New York City Public Schools.