Eye to Eye Read Online Free PDF

red line with a slash through it, similar to the implied “no” in “no smoking” signs. Even creepier, below it, in the same handwriting are the words, “We are watching you. Watch yourself!”
    From behind me, I hear, “That’s what they didn’t tell you about during your campus visit.” A thin blonde whom I vaguely remember from my interview last winter as Dr. Asa Davies takes the sheet of paper from my hand and traces her finger around the red circle. “No politics in the classroom—get it? And be warned, they have moles in all the classrooms. They actually tried to sue me last year, but it got thrown out of the kangaroo campus court. I teach postcolonial lit. Try keeping politics out of that. I suppose I should change my reading of Robinson Crusoe to explain how Friday found his true calling and learned his place in the brave, new, Eurocentric world. Welcome to Atlanta State University, where the inmates have a hand in running the asylum. Like I said, things they never tell you about on your campus visits.”
    She shrugs her shoulders, and then, like some academic oracle, she turns and disappears down the hall.
    I fold the paper in half and put it in my new tote bag, a gift from Zach when I first secured this job. Before taking any job, candidates go on “campus visits,” where they are put through a rigorous round of interviews, job talks, and given a chance to see what the campus is like for themselves. And while helpful, campus visits are sort of like first dates. Unless the school is beyond help, they put on their best face and pitch as much woo as an underfunded state university can. I knew that the student body was conservative as a whole, and I knew that there had been some stirrings in the Georgia legislature as to what should be taught in the classrooms. This is a state, after all, where they put stickers on high school science books, saying “evolution is a theory”—which, I assume is also inside the textbooks, as “theory” is scientific for “all but written in stone truth.” I figured that as a poet I could fly under the radar, but it would appear that I had figured wrong.
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    I return to my office, a concrete block with cell-like rectangular windows ringing the top—enough windows to let light in, but not enough to see the goings-on of the world outside. Atlanta State University is located on the northwest side of Atlanta in a block of buildings that could only be converted housing projects. I was shocked when I first saw my “office,” a cubicle that might just as easily have been used to interrogate prisoners in some Escape from Atlanta –style Kurt Russell TNT late-night urban guerilla warfare movie. It’s no ivory tower—it’s not even any Langsdale University, for that matter, which, while rural and threatening to unleash the children of the corn, was truly beautiful.
    The address for the university is deceptive. When I was mailing out applications, twenty-eight in all, to every job for which I was qualified within a thirty-mile radius of a large metropolitan area, Atlanta State University on Peachtree Grove Avenue sounded idyllic. I had images of a hip-but-lush campus, cordoned off from the city, with actual peach trees from which I might nab a late-afternoon snack. Never mind that I’d never seen a peach tree. Never mind that I now know that calling anything “Peachtree” in Atlanta is somewhat akin to naming a baby boy Mohammed in the Muslim world, or calling helpless newborns “Apple” or “Roman.” No peach trees bloom on Atlanta State University’s campus. In fact, only a smattering of sad, straggly saplings all but grope for light between evenly-spaced gaps of pavement lining the streets nearby. But in the academic job market, a job is a job, and by the time they offered me a position, teaching poetry no less, it was yes-I-said-yes-I-will-yes.