In ninth grade, I wrote a poem called “Rhymes with Witch.”
I don’t remember the assignment, but I feel like, generally, when we studied poetry in high school it was like: here’s a poem, read it, think about what it means, don’t you dare use this new thing called Wikipedia, then write a poem of your own but the only rule is it has to be 10 lines long.
Poetry isn’t my thing. I’m a long-form girl who thrives in the lane of “is that a run-on sentence or her own particular style” and a slew of hyphenated adjectives. Word counts were my enemy, even before journalism school.
I found poetry to be too restrictive, creatively. I’m just someone who needs the space to breathe and the space to fill with as many words as possible to get her point across. I mean, I respect poetry. I get it. And if you like that flowery shit or that
rupi
kaur
“in my feelings
and stuff”
stuff
or if you can whip out stanzas or whatever the hell they are, cool. Great for you.
I used to dread every time it became the poetry portion of the quarter*. My rules to ace it were the same as any other rules when it came to my writing: I would follow the rules, and try to sneak in a pop culture reference.
Even before Poetry Portion, ninth grade English was a particularly boring time. It was the last grade before you could start getting into “honors” classes and AP classes. I love reading, love English, and literally not trying to brag when I say I was always a kid who had read above her grade level**, so studying Robert Frost and Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare (because poetry-ish) with little Spark Notes built into the freaking textbook to explain what was going on? Give me a break.
Eventually Poetry Portion meant you had to write a poem. And I wrote this… Thing. And it was one of those terrible moments in time where you all had to stand up and share your poems and I am sweating just thinking about it. I’m incredibly private with my creative writing, she says humbly on her internet blog, and I would much rather hand in an assignment and get it back a few days later with an A+ (fine, with my poetry skills…an A-) and a little note about how good it was. But we had to read these things.
I read really fast when I get nervous, so I blacked out and must have blown through it.
But holy shit did people listen.
Swear on my cat’s life I scoured all of the Old Writings in my basement to try and find a paper copy of this poem, because the original is long gone with my parents’ 2000 HP in a technology graveyard or whatever waiting for a cyberpunk teen to find it in the year 3020.
And without the actual poem, I know it makes me an unreliable narrator. But here’s what I know I remember: it was a quippy, quick thing, maybe five or six parts, about popular girls and how they are full of shit (in very PG language)…and at the end of almost every chunk, I used “rhymes with witch” instead of, well, you know.
But, I promise I never thought of it as something groundbreaking, which is why what happened the rest of the day still sends me into fits of LOLs.
I remember my teacher’s face. She was a quiet woman, and I can’t say she made any kind of impact on me even though English teachers tended to. This sassy little collection of stanzas***, though, had made her uncomfortable.
Or, maybe it was the alluding to the B-word. It was something I had considered after I wrote it, like, was it too edgy? But, the rest of the poem was so average I just thought it would be kind of funny. And so I was like, would, uh, Emily Dickinson balk at a little EDGE I don’t THINK SO?
Plus, I had put this off for too long because I hated poetry and I had thought maybe we’d get through everyone else before I had to actually stand up and read this shit out loud.
So, actually, yeah, it was probably hearing a strong nod to a bad word from a good girl that was making her face look like that. I think she knew it wasn’t mean. It was supposed to be funny. It was an early case of Classic Coletta. It wasn’t like, “Suck it, B-word.” It was like, “You think you’re better than everyone, and one day you’ll realize you aren’t….B-word.”
I remember people clapped. I was probably casually the color of a fire hydrant, and now that I’m thinking about it, definitely sweating.
I didn’t think anything about this goofy midweek assignment of mine until hours later, when one of the most “popular” girls at my hillbilly high school turned around and flat out asked me if that poem was about one of her friends, a sporty blonde. (Or frenemies? I couldn’t keep their barely-out-of-middle-school bullshit drama straight.)
But, I, uh, like … woah. What? This girl, who had never outright bullied me, but who definitely did not have a single thing in common with me**** and so therefore we just existed in the same space for seven-ish hours every day, was asking about my homework assignment?
And the thing was—she wasn’t in my English class. Which meant someone, somewhere, in that cornfield-surrounded MF high school was talking about how Holly Coletta wrote a poem calling somebody a you-know-what.
It was such a strange rush, knowing that something I had written in 30 minutes the night before, after a new episode of “Smallville,” was causing a uproar among white girls from the 00s who definitely peaked in high school.
I remember the, like, “uh umm uhhh what umm” in my brain because I wasn’t used to computing confrontation. I remember still sweating. I remember one of my best friends sat in front of this girl, and turned around to listen to the conversation take place.
And I remember that I didn’t have some assertive, witty reply. Sorry. I was quiet in high school, especially early on.
A Smart Kid.
She’s on the School Newspaper.
She Does Yearbook and I Think Attempted Tennis.
It Would be Harmless, Drama-Wise, to Invite Her to Your Pool Party.
I had my core group of friends and their peripheral friends, mostly in the arena of color guard and marching band. I was not someone who was a class clown, who volunteered to be loud and make a scene. So maybe that’s why this popular girl with highlighted hair and tiny, tiny eyebrows was so shocked. And intrigued?
After my stomach finished relocating to my feet, I played it real cool and brushed off her question. Something smooth and not at all high-pitched, like, “What? Oh, my god, no! I don’t even talk to her! I totally don’t have a problem with her at all!”
I thought that’d be the end of it. Tiny Eyebrows had thought it was about her friend (?). But it wasn’t, so that was that. She’d probably turn around and not speak to me again until we got stuck together in a group project.
Insert HAHAHA.
Tiny Eyebrows asked me who it was about, then, if it wasn’t about Sporty Blonde. She seemed convinced there was hot goss to be … gossed.
There was a moment where I thought: this rhymes with snitch isn’t my friend, but she’s suddenly being nice to me to get something on someone else who is supposed to be her friend and that is shitty and also I have all the power right now.
I could have told her it was about her “friend” Still Wears Bright Blue Eyeshadow. I could have told her it was about her other “friend,” Asks Other People Who Had the Class Before Her for Test Answers or, “friend adjacent” Dumber Than a Cornstalk but the Popular Group Thinks It’s Funny.
I could have blown up their entire Girls Who Date Boys Who Definitely Peaked in High School food chain that day.
But I told her the truth. I told her I just made it up.
Because, here’s the thing. I am a *check notes* humongous pop culture nerd.
I already told you I fucking love reading. I was inhaling “Gossip Girl” and Meg Cabot novels and that series where it’s all text messages faster than I could swipe a library card.***** And I loved TV! And movies! I loved DCOMs and the WB and Harry Potter and it’s important to remind you now that I was not considered “popular” in high school!
I love entertainment. I wanted (and still want) to write stories and books — and freaking poems for a grade if I had to — that entertained.
I’m also… not a writer who likes to actively base names or characters off of people I know. Do my friendships and relationships and maybe small snippets of things that happened to me influence my fiction writing? Sure. But I would have never wasted the brain space in my 15-year old mind on crafting a narrative around a group of girls who tried out for cheerleading because their moms were probably cheerleaders at that same school.
I guess because I was suddenly a writer with an opinion to them, that they thought writers only wrote what they knew and I knew them so by default it had to be about one of them? Clever girls.
OR LOL they were just the type of teenage girls who thrived off of toxic relationships, who lived for the fact that someone didn’t like them, and that they could shit talk that person to their friends in order to get another person in their group to like them a little bit more that day.
Man, girl friendships sounded so exhausting when it wasn’t as easy as singing along badly to the “Rent” soundtrack in the car or sleepovers where, yes, we did all cry watching “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”!
So, listen. If that poem was based off of anyone in particular, it was a mean girl in a bigger story I was working on during my allotted 1 hour of computer time at home, who herself was a conglomerate of pop culture popular girls.****** I didn’t have a clear image of who this person was, yet, but I certainly knew who it wasn’t.
It was not about any of these girls in this small-ass school in this tiny-ass town.
But, oh my god, they were determined it was.
Three other rhymes with ditches from that “friend” “group” asked me who the poem was about, and at least one boy did, too. All people I’d known since fifth grade, because my elementary, middle and high school were in the same goddamn complex and there were only 130 of us. But none of these people were my friends, so they didn’t know that I was just a girl who liked to create characters, who couldn’t flex a poetry skill aside from “should probably rhyme?” and who really liked wordplay.
I wish there was a more dramatic ending to this, but there’s not. I shot down their guesses every time. I denied the dude who said “you can tell me and I won’t tell anyone I promise” because uh, he went to homecoming with Tiny Eyebrows so, yes, he absolutely would tell someone and, anyway, I tended to get nervous if I talked to boys for longer than 45 consecutive seconds.
My friends and I talked about it at lunch—people had asked them, too. I don’t remember if I told them what it was really about. I may have, because at least one of them usually got to read snippets of books I was writing. And if I did tell them, they were probably like, “Cool,” and then we moved on to things we usually talked about: boys we liked or cream eyeshadow from Claire’s we had tried or our favorite songs off of “From Under the Cork Tree.” This was my group, my girls. If I had written a mean poem about someone who was considered “popular” because they got more attention from country school jocks and gross flirty teachers than us, then, shit. They would have supported that, too. But they knew me. I was just a creative geek, the one in the group who’d probably write about it someday, and it would be super funny and endearing and that was that on that.
Do I wish it had been purposefully petty? That I had set out to start some shit like this was a Disney Channel original series with a scene where I skipped class to hide in the bathroom and a moral lesson moment at our lockers at the end? The honest-to-our-god-Rihanna truth is it was just an assignment that bored me so much, I leaned on something else I was excited about, creatively, to make it work. I didn’t have a problem with those girls. I’ll probably never see them again and I also don’t have a problem with that.
I know who I was then, and I know that the accidental attention gave me no fewer than three extra zits that day. And I know who I am now: a little sassier, a little louder, a lot more confident, but still very much prone to glistening if I think I’m writing something that might turn into a Thing.
By the next day, everyone had forgotten about the poem I didn’t write about them.
Except for me, of course, because for the first time in my little writer life, for half a day and only in the halls of a high school in the middle of nowhere, I had kiiind of felt like one bad rhymes with witch.*******
*Semester? I don’t even remember how high school worked, lol?
**Never met a Mary Kate & Ashley Mystery chapter book that I didn’t want to crush in one sitting.
***Not sure if this is the right lingo and I don’t feel like Googling it because I don’t even like poetry anyway.
****Smart in a Math way, whereas I was smart in an English way. Flirted with older boys. Actively participated in Spirit Week. Turned out to be a racist, so, I don’t feel bad bringing up her Tiny Eyebrows.
*****I’m talking a card for school and both the nearest towns, stacks on stacks on stacks.
******Kate from Lizzie McGuire types. Mandy Moore from Princess Diaries types. A stereotypical 2000s Mean Girl, if you will.
*******Bitch. ✌🏻
hi, i’m holly. 