Essay Model

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Essay Model 

        — Unit 1: "Allegory of the Cave," The Truman Show, various selected texts.


The prompt is something like “what’s

really real?” Beneath and behind

the shadows and actors, chains 

and sirens and a guy going to work 

again the way he always does, 

what’s that light round the rim,

glimmering like broken glass? 

 

The challenge is to synthesize, 

to take a jostling mass  

of texts and see that “yes, 

they don’t all look the same, 

but here’s this one, central claim.”  


They always turn it in round

9/11, a day that means to them

the weather’s beginning to turn

and maybe they’ll wear

their hoodie to the game. 

I was only seven, my mom,

as she'd come to say, "reading history

to you as history was made,"


and today we aren’t anywhere near 

New York and gone by 25 years, 


but phone records model 

how to answer the prompt 

directly, cut through the static 

to reach Ground Zero 

before the call cuts. With no time 

to pick out its evening attire

or make it up for that cute boy, 

with their distinct voices

slicing through such fragile illusions

as time and space they all

about-face and get right to bedrock,


the same assertion at the core of every

call before the beep. I love you. I love

you, and it isn't cheap.


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