Few things are precisely known about the speaker in the poem “Hanging Fire,” written by Audre Lorde. In this poem, the speaker is a fourteen year old colored girl. She is quite normal for a girl her age; she has a crush on a teenage boy and wears braces to straighten her teeth. This girl has doubt, this is shown in her statement she does desire to do anything. Like most teenagers she compares herself to her peers, question why she isn’t on the Math Team when grades were better than the male she envied. The teenager in the poem is feeling depressed and worthless. Teenagers go through these stages. For example she says “suppose I die before graduation they will sing sad melodies but finally tell the truth about me” (pg.719 Lorde) this shows how little she thinks of herself. She mentions dying repeatedly throughout the poem. She also mentions on page 719, “and momma’s in the bedroom with the door closed” (Lorde) leading the reader to believe she feels lonely, neglected, and go without notice. She feels she isn’t pretty when she speaks of her betraying skin and ashy knees. The reader can also imply that the teenager feels unable to take care of herself in the many statements that she might die soon, because of the lack of mother’s attention. The poem “Hanging Fire” is quite sad and very realistic. On another note, the poem “We Real Cool,” written by Gwendolyn Brooks, is short and sweet, but full of real world youth related problems. The “We” in this poem, is seven pool players who have dropped out of school. They see this act as a cool thing, like big and bad boys. More specifically the “we” is meant to have the reader think about the validity of the seven pool players. The seven pool players are unsure of who they really are, but they don’t question it on a daily basis consciously; instead they continually state what makes them cool and how cool they are. The phrase “Live fast, die young, and leave