The last couple of weekends a select few of the writers in the program have been driving to Yale to break stuff and loot small trinkets from their literary department.  In a recent post I said we broke a lion statue, but that was somewhat of a fabrication.  At most, it was usually nothing more than peeing on door handles and breaking a few gates.  At least that was the extent of it until Rachel Cole ran through the quad last weekend with a fire extinguisher.  I’m not sure where she got the fire extinguisher or if she drove up with the rest of us, but there she was, with the canister raised over her head, running towards one of the dorms, yelling about an MFA writer living in room 112.  It seemed odd for a graduate student to live in the dorms, but one of the second years said the Yale program tended to coddle their writers and has even been known to have a grocery service that hand delivers your purchases to your door.  So it felt necessary to follow Rachel inside.  In my head I figured she’d either be banging on the door with the canister or spraying the outside of the door, but when we got inside we found that she had tucked the nozzle under the door and was emptying the canister.  I laughed at first, but after the initial reaction I wondered what kind of damage this would cause.  I figured all the person’s belongings would get wet.  It wasn’t until five minutes later, after Rachel finished, and we were walking back to our car that someone mentioned the chemicals in a fire extinguisher are toxic.  One of the second year poets said a kid he went to high school with died because he sucked on a fire extinguisher as part of a dare.  A few days later I saw Rachel.  She laughed and said, “That’s how my dad used to kill mice, but only he used a shoebox.”

For those interested, here’s a link to Rachel’s blog.