Ted Kooser, US Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006. Photo by UNL Publications and Photography.

We who teach creative writing have been known to tell our students that there is no subject so common and ordinary that it can’t be addressed in a poem, and this one, by Michael McFee, who lives in North Carolina, is a good example of that.

Spitwads

Little paper cuds we made

by ripping the corners or edges

from homework and class notes

then ruminating them into balls

we’d flick from our fingertips

or catapult with pencils

or (sometimes after lunch)

launch through striped straws

like deadly projectiles

toward the necks of enemies

and any other target where they’d

stick with the tiniest splat,

I hope you’re still there,

stuck to unreachable ceilings

like the beginnings of nests

by generations of wasps

too ignorant to finish them

or under desktops with blunt

stalactites of chewing gum,

little white words we learned

to shape and hold in our mouths

while waiting to let them fly,

our most tenacious utterance.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2005 by Michael McFee, whose most recent book of poetry is The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from Shinemaster, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2006, by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.