{"id":130936,"date":"2019-04-15T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=130936"},"modified":"2019-04-14T08:49:34","modified_gmt":"2019-04-14T07:49:34","slug":"hate-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/04\/hate-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Hate Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t know what to do with the sadness<br \/>\nor the hate. The hate<br \/>\nwhat makes me sad. Not<br \/>\nmy hate. The haters\u2019 hate. The haters<br \/>\nhave been trying to teach me<br \/>\nto hate. <em>See the bird. See<\/em><br \/>\n<em>my boot. See the concrete curb,<\/em><br \/>\n<em>perch for the bird. Thump.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>Crunch. Crackle.<\/em> (Think your teeth<br \/>\nbreaking a taco chip into crumbs.) Beak<br \/>\nburping blood. Feathers<br \/>\nleaking out from beneath boot sole. Hater<br \/>\neyes searching mine for co-mission.<br \/>\n<em>Bad bird. Not the kind<\/em><br \/>\n<em>we want. Get it? Hate<\/em><br \/>\n<em>bad bird.<\/em> I curl up my fists. My mind<br \/>\nfights me. <em>Don\u2019t! Don\u2019t <\/em><br \/>\n<em>hate the haters.<\/em> Glad it\u2019s winter<br \/>\ncurl up beneath layered blankets<br \/>\nloving warmth. Afraid<br \/>\nof morning. Afraid it won\u2019t<br \/>\nstill be dark when I open my eyes,<br \/>\nloving warmth and darkness. Afraid<br \/>\nof morning dim in the window<br \/>\nlike the shadow cast by the dead bird<br \/>\nwho wants me to do something. What?<br \/>\nHate the hater? Be the obedient<br \/>\npupil? Learn<br \/>\nto hate? Let the haters win?<\/p>\n<p>_________________________________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Leslie-Lytle-CS.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-131020 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Leslie-Lytle-CS-e1554721019825.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"121\" \/><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>Leslie Lytle\u2019s poems have appeared in <\/em>The Carolina Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Literary Review, New England Review<em> and elsewhere. In her novel <\/em>Chicken Stock<em> (Hedgehog and Fox, 2015), a young woman desperate to save the family farm battles corporate agriculture. In <\/em>Execution\u2019s Doorstep<em> (nonfiction, University Press of New England, 2008) five innocent men struggle against a system that wants to execute them for crimes they didn\u2019t commit\u2014\u201cin real life, the true hell just might be inside the heads of the innocent men behind bars.\u201d (Playboy, Nov. 2008). She works as a reporter for the Sewanee Mountain Messenger.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t know what to do with the sadness<br \/>\nor the hate. The hate<br \/>\nwhat makes me sad. Not<br \/>\nmy hate. The haters\u2019 hate. The haters<br \/>\nhave been trying to teach me<br \/>\nto hate. See the bird. See<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":131020,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[868],"class_list":["post-130936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}