Contemporary Announcement

Ring the big bells,
cook the cow,
put on your silver locket.
The landlord is knocking at the door
and I've got the rent in my pocket.

Douse the lights,
hold your breath,
take my heart in your hand.
I lost my job two weeks ago
and rent day's here again.

:: May Angelou, Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?

Needle

My mother had a black Singer

sewing machine when I was very young.

It chugged along, making straight seams
like a stationary train engine spitting out track

or if I squinted just right I felt like I was
riding in a car, looking out the back window,

watching telephone wires swoop away
pole to pole along the shoulder of the road.

Once, entranced by the way it pumped,
I reached my finger up to touch

the thin bright shaft,
the part I loved best,

and now I can’t look
a needle in the eye

without thinking of that thread
still connecting us.

:: Joseph Green, in Crab Creek Review

The Clerk's Lunch

The clerk will run blocks
to return a borrowed nickel
but she is always the last one
helped at the counter
where she can only afford
a cup of soup (split pea)
and a hard roll with a little butter,
which she tears apart,
one hill from the other,
not caring where the poppy seeds
fall, her hunger is so great.

:: Anya Achtenberg, in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Poetry, Fiction, and Photographs

Sawdust

There are many ways to kneel

and kiss the earth
– Rumi

At his workbench, my Catholic husband
becomes a Buddhist practicing mindfulness.
As if entranced, he attends the hammer’s
rhythmic up-and-down. He feeds the planer
a plank of cedar. Beside a Folger’s coffee
can of nails on the windowsill, the clock
ticks the present tense: is, is, is. When he
walks to the table saw, he moves deliberately
like an egret stepping into its own watery
reflection. There he contemplates the sawness
of saw. He doesn’t brush off the sawdust
film falling all over him like a coat of serenity.
Sometimes he makes a rocking cradle,
sometimes a porch swing for us to sit in.

:: Judith Tate O'Brien, in Rattle #22, Winter 2004

Load

The girl on the bench in the Laundromat is barely eleven, the kind of girl with no hint of
a figure—no future cup waiting to overflow, all soft baby curves. She’ll stay that way
until she’s fifty-five, except then she’ll no longer be cute, she’ll be a statistic which
typifies her State. But now, the boy comes in with his dad to fill up the gumball
machine—and the empty container next to it with toys and surprises: cheap rings with
fake gems that glow like candy, tiny ball caps, miniature purple aliens that ride
permanent skateboards, plastic stretch frogs that stick to the ceiling. The boy’s hat is
tipped back and she is in the grip of his smile which is directed at everything and
nothing. He is older, wiser. She can tell by the way his father lets him handle change
that this is a boy going places. A merchant, a magician of the middle school set. And all
of a sudden, you can see her whole damn high school career: standing by the wall at a
dance, not being asked, holding back, pulling her dress down over the tummy fat,
wincing as this boy moves (always out of reach), marrying that other boy down the
street with the dimples but no brains, who starts drinking too much and stays out too
late, and gives her three kids and a mortgage and a part-time job at the Rent-a-Skate.
That’s her, too, in the Laundromat, over there talking to the neighbor, her hair in a
scarf, no make-up, saying, “Lawd, you wouldna believe the ironing I’ve had to do for the
lot,” but dropping the “o” in ironing because it’s just too hard to enunciate in East Texas.
It’s too hard to live like this, with your dreams dying all the time—or dead. And you can
tell all this when she bows her head, then glances up at the boy, who goes through the
doors, into the air, into the car, into the highway, traveling far away. A half an hour
later, you can still hear the plunk plunk plunking of those tiny plastic objects, those multi-
colored spheres, those minute wheels churning through her heart.


:: Christine Butterworth-McDermott, in Rattle #31, Summer 2009