Toribio Mendez Discussion 13

As I read through this week’s poems, the main three assumptions referenced in “How to read a poem” popped up in my head many times. The poem that stood out for me was “White Lies” by Natasha Tretheway. The first time I read the poem I felt like it was the easiest to understand out of the list of poems assigned so far. I even went on to read the rest of the other poem thinking I fully understood it. As I finish the remaining poems I go back to “ White Lies” and realize I may have missed some details. When I read lines like “I could act/ like my homemade dresses/ came straight out the window/ of Maison Blanche.”I assumed the poem was about the narrator lying about their financial situation. After rereading the poem and analyzing lines like, “like the time a white girl said/(squeezing my hand), Now/we have three of us in this class.” I start to think maybe the narrator is black and has fair skin and lies about their ethnicity, which is much more of a punishable offense since her mother disciplines them for these lies. Then again, I can be be wrong, maybe there is no right or wrong and it was left to be interpreted by the reader however they please.