Working Class Poems

Novella

2012-01-16T17:32:00.024-05:00

A single man's on the corner
waiting for the express bus
to come. It's cold out. He
dips down deeper into
his coat, the huge green
overcoat he bought used for
$10 from a Polish bouncer
down on his luck. I called
him a man, but he's 17,
working evenings and weekends
in a surplus store on Linwood
watching the tough guys stealing
whatever they want and giving him
the stare that says, Open your
mouth and you will be sorry.
What's he care if they get
a couple pairs of rusted pliers,
socket wrenches in metric
sizes? Boss drives a pre-war
Packard Twelve and has three
different businesses all making
money faster than he can
spend it buying drive shafts stolen
from the old Hudson assembly plant
on East Grand. Our man is on
his way to his mother's
for an overdone roast with
his two older brothers, both in
college, both aiming at bigger
things, both married to the wrong
women, as they won't discover
for twenty more years when
it's almost too late. Twenty years
from now he'll remember
none of this. Not because
he smokes too much or drinks
too much or because he'll step
out in the path of a semi.
No, because he doesn't see how
important the day is, not even
when the bus comes and he climbs
on, his glasses fogging over,
and drops his dime in the box,
not even when the hazel-eyed
girl from Sacred Heart smiles
up at him and slides over
closer to her sister to make
room for him, and he sits
beside her, tucking the skirts
of the green coat under his
suddenly sweating legs as he
turns to the girl to thank her
and feels something like lightning
strike between the hurried beats
of his heart as he studies
the two wide-opened eyes studying
him, the delicate nose, the perfect
mouth which in her entire lifetime
has never uttered a single sentence
you or I or he would ever care to hear.
When she rises at last to leave
he doesn't stop her or even try,
though she waits. Instead he waits
for his own stop and walks
the familiar blocks to where
people expect him. At last
the snow that's held itself
inside the gray clouds begins to
fall, a curtain separating every
living thing between the Seven
Mile Road and the Outer Drive
from every other living thing.

:: Philip Levine, in Five Points 3:2, Winter 1999

School Nurse's Journal

2012-01-09T00:45:00.031-05:00

Outside the school the kids swat about;
their swings jabber with them.
Just off the morning yellow bus,
being back to the books of no import,
hatted, coated, their bright-colored
wings see-sawing now on the sunlight.
Be prepared for anything
reads the motto on my office wall,
for scrapes, nosebleeds,
poison ivy, geenstick
fractures, chipped front teeth,
torn britches, wet clothes,
have something for those
who forget their lunch,
be watchful of bruises and sprains.
I check my cabinets again--
ice bags, bandages, sanitary pads,
peanut butter, and bread--
and draw up lists:
TD shots for tots at 10,
sports physicals at two,
dental hygiene, grade four,
conference with special ed.
Wheezing, chickenpox, name it,
get it. I don't mind the head lice
anymore, not since the mouse
last year, found fast asleep
and nesting in the upsweep
of Megan's hair, a cute farm critter,
just cut loose; Lord, so alive
and breathing. Let things drone,
this first school autumn day,
just a few larky flies coming in,
lured perhaps out of dung by
a whiff from the teachers' room.
As I listen for the first school bell
kids outdoors still buzz the yard,
their swings whirring with them:
higher and higher to pump at dreams,
airy as fifty snowflakes.

:: Celia Brown, in American Journal of Nursing (2000)

Small Talk at an Academic Conference on the Working Class

2012-01-02T12:45:00.006-05:00

I've been cornered by another conference
attendee who wants to tell me about his working
class experience: how he once wrote twelve pages
deconstructing the binary oppositions

within the Greatest Hits of Bruce Springsteen.
I let indifference register on my face
as I read him like a bad poem.
A collar the color of photocopy paper.

Metaphors as obvious as dead-end streets.
His language is always in Word Perfect.
No spelling errors or fragments
or Final Notice stamps. We shake hands

and I note how clean his fingernails are.
No dirt in the ridges of his fingerprints.
Nothing that could leave a stain
on our handshake or a smudge on his resume.

:: Andrew Rihn, The Rust Belt MRI (Pudding House, 2010)

At the Office Holiday Party

2011-12-26T12:45:00.010-05:00

I can now confirm that I am not just fatter

than everyone I work with, but I’m also fatter
than all their spouses. Even the heavily bearded
bear in accounting has a little otter-like boyfriend.

When my co-workers brightly introduce me
as “the funny one in the office,” their spouses
give them a look which translates to, Well, duh,
then they both wait for me to say something funny.

A gaggle of models comes shrieking into the bar
to further punctuate why I sometimes hate living
in this city. They glitter, a shiny gang of scissors.
I don’t know how to look like I’m not struggling.

Sometimes on the subway back to Queens,
I can tell who’s staying on past the Lexington stop
because I have bought their shoes before at Payless.
They are shoes that fool absolutely no one.

Everyone wore their special holiday party outfits.
It wasn’t until I arrived at the bar that I realized
my special holiday party outfit was exactly the same
as the outfits worn by the restaurant’s busboys.

While I’m standing in line for the bathroom,
another patron asks if I’m there to clean it.

:: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Everything Is Everything (Write Bloody, 2010)

About Cleaning Bathrooms

2011-12-19T12:45:00.008-05:00

It seems I'm always barging in
on somebody who's caught in a
compromising position. Right off,
they accuse me of spying.
What can I say?
How can I deny it?
I reply, muttering something
foolish about having to polish
the white porcelain or lay out
a fresh supply of paper towels.
But the embarrassed eyes follow me
out the squeaking black door,
they don't believe me.
For god's sake, why should I care
about the size of his dick or
whether or not she's been sitting
on the pot reading Vogue for
twenty minutes or who hurriedly
shoved a Playboy behind the stall?
And why would I take note of the
men who spray themselves with
cologne or the woman who plugs up
the john with tampons every single
month? No, it's pretty dull stuff.
But still they accuse me.
You Don't Look Like a Janitor.
The words accost me,
I ignore them.
I lay the toilet paper out gingerly.
I spray the air with just the right
amount of deodorizer, I whistle a lot.
As far as I'm concerned if you've seen
one ass, you've seen them all.

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

My Granddad's Last Career

2011-12-12T12:45:00.000-05:00

Not one of his wristwatches

ever kept time after he’d fixed it,
although he eventually did get one to tick,

its flat hands jerking like nerve
damage, like delirium tremens,
around its white, innocent face.

:: Joseph Green, in The Threepenny Review

The Barber

2011-12-05T12:45:00.037-05:00

1. His Day

In his chair he sleeps,
Narcissus of scissors,
infinitely framed
in the tall shop mirrors.

Arranged in his shelf:
Wild Root, Vitalis
where talcum hints
rigor corporalis.

The tools of his craft
lie still where he snores,
sharp as a quill
or Ockham's razor.

2. The Barber at Twilight

The shop is closed
the lights are down
the chair he sat in
like a burnished throne
stands empty now,
and avenue crowds
slowly appear
in evening air
as the barber stares
from his upstate room
as night descends.

3. The Barber in Ecstasy

The magazine drops
by the bedside stand.
His hand, pensive,
strays across his thigh.
You're lovely, lovely,
the barber's voice whispers.
He tucks the naked
pillow to his side.

4. His Dream

Emerging from the tunnel, he enters
the garden where the goddess of wine,
raven-haired Siduri, pours him a tall one:
Day and night, day and night, feast and rejoice . . .
The barber lies down in the tall flowers
of heaven, as if there were no going home.

:: Daniel Tobin, in Cumberland Poetry Review, spring 1994

City Moon

2011-11-28T12:45:00.000-05:00

Perfect disc of moon, huge

and simmering
low on the capital’s filthy horizon— ¡Ay,
qué luna más hermosa! she says
pushing the stroller slowly down Atocha.
And gorgeous too the firm-thighed

boys from Lisbon
a block away, who work
Kilometer Zero’s sidewalk, the neon
shoestore they lean against
cupping the flames
of passing strangers.

The sky above Puerta del Sol turns
a darker shade of blue. Who says
it doesn’t become night’s
one eye
as it scales the heavens, paling
and shrinking before it moves

across a late June sky? And below,
men persist and circle
the plaza, twin fountains brimming
over their brilliant waters. Hours
from now with the heat
waning, the same moon will spot

the figure of him
making past Neptune, the Ritz
the orange jumpsuits
hopping off trucks to sweep
and spray, hosing
down those electric streets.

:: Francisco Aragon, Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 2005)

Sweating Copper

2011-11-21T12:45:00.000-05:00

My father taught me the hard way:
dusty coveralls in the crawl space

with the water off, and no matter what,
we were stuck there until we finished up.

Cobwebs strung the floor joists
where I had to aim the trouble light

and hold it still so he could see
just what the hell was going on.

If I let it slip, he grabbed my wrist
and dragged the light back where he wanted it

above the tubing cutter and the emery cloth
and the little metal-handled flux brush

in the jar of flux. The solder wire
coiled around itself the way I wrapped

my thoughts on their hollow core.
Then the quiet hiss of bottled gas,

flint-scratch of the spark lighter,
the blue tongue licking through the flame

along the copper pipe to make the solder run
bright as mercury into the fitted seam.

Smell of cool dirt. Smell of coffined air.
Smell of gas and flux and solder vapor

piercing it all like my father’s whisper:
Can’t you pay attention, maybe, just for once?

:: Joseph Green, in Nimrod

Glove / Hand

2011-11-14T12:45:00.000-05:00

The hands have trouble being naked.

The hand has trouble with the pen.

In the gloves the fingers do not feel
hot or cold or sharp.
The gloves make the hands
part of a machine.

The gloved hand is a paw,
an awkward, swiping thing.

Without claws.
The glove gets the job done.
The hand has little to say.

:: Jim Daniels, Punching Out

Architect

2011-11-07T12:45:00.000-05:00

She drew the dimensions, but did not set the bounds.
Her rooms were white lines on blue papers:
some days she saw in them lovers, other days, dying men.
She would have liked to have painted them,
a Van Gogh violet for the master bedroom,
Matisse yellow for the kitchen, a trompe l'oeil
in the dining room to disorient the guests.
To the powder room, she would send flocks
of paper nightingales, lavender, silent for now,
but ready to tell all later: the songs sung
between the satin sheets, the coos that came
with conceptions, the promises that ran,
like a prodigy's black ink, down her walls,
always white-lined on blue paper.

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

Syrian Light and the Leisure of Moths

2011-10-31T12:45:00.013-04:00

This must have been how it was
to look down from the orchard hills of Ghota at dawn,
and see Damascus shining far below
and for the last time.

In that light, it must have looked fragile and clean
like acres of card houses.
He had what he could walk with--
the piastres for his ticket,
flat bread for the slow passage, a folded
name and address.

But this isn't the honeyed light of memory; it's coal dust
from the number three shaft mine in Clearview, West Virginia,
drifting through the windows and doors,
mapping the palms of his small, brown hands,
following him into the house where his wife
is raising nine children and living at the stove
with her ginger root fingers and her cabbage heart
             the leaves of which she gives away.

She was a cool round washing machine
             wearing a feedsack apron.
He was a lunch pail and beard full of coal
             gone to the mine with the night's last shadows.

Weaving ruined nylons into rugs,
hunting dandelions in spring,
scraping the bones of dinner
into the black dirt of the garden,
they never owned a car, or flew on a plane,
or tasted store-bought eggs.

What was he thinking, the night
I found him watching the listless way
the gypsy moths kept flopping their wings against
the screen, a dozen opiated concubines,
each of them yawning and waving a fan?

The Syria that was left for him was in his fig and apricot trees.
Hauntng no one in the paid-for house,
settled, but half-homeless
until the breath in his black and clouded lungs
refused to move.

:: Eliot Khalil Wilson, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go (Cleveland, 2003)

In Praise of My Bed

2011-10-24T12:45:00.008-04:00

At last I can be with you!

The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.

:: Meredith Holmes, Shubad's Crown (Pond Road Pr, 2003)

The Tomato Packing Plant Line

2011-10-17T12:45:00.005-04:00

Bumped and rolling jovially
down the conveyor the tomatoes
dance in       a press of faces
the shine on their skins like smiles
the stem ends chipper as cowlicks.

Young women remove the mistakes--
harelips       two-headed ones       gashed ones
with papery crosshatched scars.
Tiny ones too are removed
to be juiced with the freaks.

At the far end hemmed in by boxes
the old women sort the tomatoes
the largest and the perfect ones first.
Their hands       like their eyes
know the swell before ripeness.
It is something they flaunted
on Fridays            a gust that inflated
box-pleated skirts into bells
as they stepped into dusk
hands washed white of tomatoes
which did not survive
their ripeness.

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

Traveling Salesman

2011-10-10T12:45:00.000-04:00

He finds himself stepping off the bus in some burg he’s already bored with. Picking
his teeth for 200 miles—here’s where he spits the toothpick out. Past Holiday Inn
the neighborhoods get dark. All-night laundromats where women with circles under
their eyes press laundered underwear, warm as bread, against their sinuses. Finally,
he’s signing the register at a funeral home where he knows no one, but is mistaken
for a long-lost friend of the deceased, for someone who has dislocated his life to
make the hazardous journey on a night when the dead man’s own children have
avoided him. Once again instinct has taken him where he’s needed; where the
unexpected transforms routine into celebration. He kneels before the corpse,
striking his forehead against the casket.

:: Stuart Dybek, Brass Knuckles (Pittsburgh, 1979)

MyKillAdoreHer

2011-10-03T12:45:00.021-04:00

That Lucia broke the machine twice in one week was evidence enough. He also offered
this—she’s no longer automatic, her stitches are crooked and once another seamstress
found Lucia’s “lost” sewing patterns in the trash. The security guard half listened as
Lucia gathered her things. Then the manager turned directly to her—what is it with
you? We give you work, put money in your pocket. She put on her best disappointed
face as they escorted her past rows of itchy throats, bowed heads, the refrain of needle
through fabric.

Every day Elena counts pig. A pageant of molded plastic rolling down the conveyor belt.
The task: grab Miss Piggy, pull gown over snout, fasten two tiny buttons, grab another.
With each doll Elena’s hands grow stiffer. Her feet grow heavy as the concrete below.
Dolls spit at her, or maybe this is imagined, but the ache in her legs might be real. The
supervisor brushes against her back when he patrols the floor. After standing for
hours, the room begins to blur. Her mouth opens like an empty wallet as naked dolls
march on.

What will settle in, what will rise from the lungs of girls who still burn weeks after
detox treatment at a local clinic. Speak of headaches, blurred vision, diarrhea. How
they suck air thick with sulfuric acid. Acetone working past unfiltered exhaust systems
and through their livers. Most return to work despite doctors’ orders. Back inside, the
tin roof and their steady perspiration remind them they’re still alive—together one
breathing, burning machine.

Like Celia’s pockets, there’s nothing but lint here. Lint & dead machines. The sound of
layoffs & profit margins. Yesterday this department droned an unsynchronized rhythm
of coughing girls tethered to well-lubed motors. Row after row of pre-asthmatic lungs.
Black hair buried under perpetual white. The decision was made across the border, he
tells them. Nothing I can do about it. Sometimes Celia would imagine the whole place
caught inside a tiny globe. Something she could pick up. Shake.

A perpetual conveyor, he patrols her mouth. The sound of unfiltered white. Breathing
margins. The task: grab Elena’s hands. Pull. Fasten. He also offered crooked patterns.
Put money in her hair. That Lucia broke. Was evidence enough? Molded vision as a
refrain. An empty wallet will rise. Speak. How they exhaust systems. Despite the
blurred other, the ache might be real. Something she could pick up. Across the border,
nothing I can imagine.

:: Paul Martinez Pompa, My Kill Adore Him (Notre Dame, 2009)

Calling Him Back from Layoff

2011-09-26T12:45:00.010-04:00

I called a man today. After he said

hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been

confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was

and it turns out I’m OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars

painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that’s a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle

for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said

he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean

and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through

with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions

as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried

with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward

than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other

and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other

forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones

hear?

:: Bob Hicok, Insomnia Diary (Pittsburgh, 2004)

The Radium Girls

2011-09-19T12:45:00.014-04:00

She doesn't mind talking about hers
the slow kind       bruises and swellings
an epidemic of tumors       more photos
nubile girls in cloche hats
wall-eyed boas       grinning at the camera

Radium dial factory girls       deft of hand
each proud to be a woman       earning a man's paycheck
painting numbers       that glow in the dark
on our bedroom clocks       a the time clock ticks
their tractable faces       white and luminous
as calla lilies       bending bobbed heads
over their handiwork       licking the pearly tips
to stub their brushes       to a fine point

In this new element       distilled from deep underground
in the moist rich earth       promising miracle cures
and healing waters       each one unaware
she offers       a share of her body       a note to come due
in five years or ten       down the line

In the X-ray room       she crouches on an iron table
in the government study       the Army needs to see
her shining ribs       her spine like organ keys

More photos       boarded-up factories
steel coffins       barely muffle
the radiant ticking below       negative numbers
half-lives poisoned       an empty clock face
its nights and days       burned away

Sixty years later       this Midwestern grave
of the last of the red-hot mommas
still too hot to handle

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

January in Detroit or Search for Tomorrow Starring Ken and Ann

2011-09-12T12:45:00.008-04:00

I think it is interesting

though not exactly amusing
how we go from day to day
with no money. How do we
do it, friends ask, suspecting
we really have some stash
stacked away somewhere.
But we certainly do not
and we also do not know
how we do it either.
You are so lucky,
some of our friends say. I am
none too sure of that though,
as I wait for the winning
lottery numbers to be announced
on CKLW. Thursday in Detroit
is the day of dreams. We have
been dreaming of a place
in the country lately and I’m
none too sure that is very healthy.
And speaking of health that’s
also been a problem that probably
has something to do with no money,
since we’ve all been sick lately,
taking turns politely of course.
Could you bring me some more
tea one of us will ask,
and the other will.
In between the coughing and
worrying our thoughts
have often turned to crime.
We seriously wonder how we can
get away with a bundle with
as little risk as possible.
Last week we took our last
$12 out of the bank
and noticed how much more
they had there though
we had none. Of course
we wouldn’t rob that bank,
they know us there
as the ones who bring
the rolls of pennies in.
And just yesterday they
fish-eyed us for trying
to cash our son’s xmas bond
from his grandparents
after only one month.
So we wouldn’t try to rob that bank,
but I do know of one up north
that may be possible. . .
I know this just seems like
romantic dreaming
but I practically make a career
of reading detective stories,
and God knows, I have no other.
Anyway if the right opportunity
comes along, we are more
than ready to meet it.
But this is a time of waiting,
the I Ching says, though it does
not say how we are to eat
while waiting. And soon
we will have another mouth to feed—
Ann now in her seventh month,
and that is often in our thoughts.
Besides all that we are both
over thirty, artist and poet,
still waiting to cross the great water.
Meanwhile, day after day,
there is still Detroit
to be dealt with – a small pond
says our friend Snee.
Big fish we used to answer him,
but that was a while back.
Now we think maybe Lake Erie
is the great water referred to
in the I Ching, and if we wait
long enough we can
walk across – to Buffalo
or Cleveland. In a healthy person,
says the philosopher, self-pity
can be a forerunner to action:
once the problem is seen clearly,
a solution may be found at hand.
And as I said, I think it is interesting
though not exactly amusing.

:: Ken Mikolowski, Big Enigmas (Past Tents, 1991)

The Circle of Chairs

2011-08-15T12:45:00.011-04:00

In her dry-goods store a haphazard
collection of chairs circled
the coal stove: peeling wicker
from the sun parlor, a blurred
needlepoint beyond its prime,
an oak rocker with a broken arm
and a kitchen pine of many Joseph coats
that served faithfully six days a week.

Miss Clara climbed the ladder, her thin
arms pulling muslin and gingham
from rainbow shelves. As women rocked
and gossiped, flannel thumped
across the counter, and tatting shuttles
flew like tongues. Apron patterns were
traced on tissue, while wool, harsh
as a scratchy throat, was folded
into brown bags. Daisy chains were looped
and linked, bluebirds opened wings
on baby bibs. In spring, satin whispered
across the measuring plank and from
the island of linens a bride's gift
of sunbonnet pillows was chosen.

A recipe for jonquil cake traveled
the circle as buffalo nickels roamed
from the cash register to children's
pockets, quarters turned up in
birthday hems, until the chairs
emptied, and Miss Clara leaned the
CLOSED sign against the pale mannequin.
Hunched over her books at the desk
she tried to balance, always
came up short. Pushing worrisome
wisps of grey hair into the net
she'd order more yardage and thread
knowing they'd soon need Easter clothes.

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

Cannery Town in August

2011-08-08T12:45:00.021-04:00

All night it humps the air.
Speechless, the steam rises
from the cannery columns. I hear
the night bird rave about work
or lunch, or sing the swing shift
home. I listen, while bodyless
uniforms and spinach specked shoes
drift in monochrome down the dark
moon-possessed streets. Women
who smell of whiskey and tomatoes,
peach fuzz reddening their lips and eyes--
I imagine them not speaking, dumbed
by the cans' clamor and drop
to the trucks that wait, grunting
in their headlights below.
They spotlight those who walk
like a dream, with no one
waiting in the shadows
to palm them back to living.

:: Lorna Dee Cervantes

Window Washer

2011-08-01T12:45:00.007-04:00

One hand slops suds on, one

hustles them down like a blind.
Brusque noon glare, filtered thus,
loosens and glows. For five or
six minutes he owns the place,
dismal coffee bar, and us, its
huddled underemployed. A blade,
black line against the topmost glass,

begins, slices off the outer lather,
flings it away, works inward,
corrals the frothy middle, and carves,
with quick cuts, the stuff down,
not looking for anything, beneath
or inside. Homes to the last,
cleans its edges, grooms it for
the end, then shaves it off

and flings it away. Which is
splendid, and merciless. And all
in the wrist. Then, he looks at us.
We makers of filth, we splashers
and spitters. We sitters and watchers.
Who like to see him work.
Who love it when he leaves
and gives it back: our grim hideout,
half spoiled by clarity.

:: Christopher Todd Matthews, in Field # 82, 2010.

Sutliffe Bridge

2011-07-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

You wouldn't know about the bridge, bar and store
unless you were local, but now that the flood-
waters are down, everyone is coming to stand
and stare at the empty space: half a bridge gone,
grabbed in the river's fist, twisted and dragged
downstream to where its dark skeletal tips break
the gentle surface, pointing awry at the sky
like rusty hindsight exclamations of distress.

People murmur that the lost half should be brought back.
It could be retrieved, restored--just a matter
of allocating the money and equipment.
But will the county ante up? It was an old
bridge with scabrous cement piers, wooden planks
that roared like thunder when you drove
over them, and diminutive spans shedding
flakes at every vibration--the puce metallic bits
freckling the roadway until the wind blew
them away. There's a newer bridge upstream--
it survived this flood and looks good for a few more.

The Sutliffe store used to sell everything from seeds
to paraffin to aspirin to boots. But it's been fifty
years and now the high tin-ceilinged room--with its
bounty of varnished shelves and drawers and marble
countertops, its glass display cases a remote
emphasis of emptiness and dust, its spindle
of parcel string still hanging at shoulder height
near the silent brass register--serves only as a way
to pass from the original bar to the recent dining
addition out back, so new that its exterior
still reads, KEVLAR KEVLAR KEVLAR, from every angle.

They do a booming business in Old Milwaukee pencil-
necks, fried bluegill baskets, and chili dogs. You can
eat inside while the jukebox skips and mingles
with talk of tractor parts and DVDs, or go
out to the riverbank where a few guys
have their lines in, casting for trout or bass
around the weeds under the bridge.

Imagine, after the flood with what newly brilliantined
suddenness the sunlight must have struck through
the water where there had been the shade of the bridge
for more than a hundred years--weeds and fish shocked
in an aqueous net of umber turning to neon green,
skated upon by the movements of clouds.

Visitors in the know write their names on dollar bills
and tape them to the low ceiling and walls of the bar--
a glaze of long-forgotten singles ambered by age
and grease and smoke. The old ladies like it here,
parking their walkers along the wall, and the farmers
wanting lunch and conversation, and the Harley
riders who come through the screen door in groups
with dust from the gravel road blunting the shine
on their leather. Since the bridge went out, bar business
has been better than usual. No one needs strong
black thread or lampwicks anymore, but they still
want potatoes piping hot out of the oil and a place
to congregate, and this small destruction--no human
deaths involved--mean nature's power affirmed,
the satisfaction of fretting over an impersonal loss,
and a blank in the air that looks like change.

:: Anne Pierson Wiese, in The Southern Review (Summer, 2010)

High and Low

2011-07-18T12:45:00.025-04:00

She never complained of the indignity,
the way, still crouched on the floor,
she had to gather up the boxes,
listen to the mocking of the tissue paper
rattling beneath her fingertips,
face the last whiffs of the rebels
whose owners had rejected her, saying things like,
"They pinch," or "My toe rubs at the front,"
or, worst of all, because she never knew why,
"No, I don't think they're right."
Sometimes, remembering the state of their nails,
or noticing that their socks hadn't matched,
or that they had, out of vanity,
worn a size too small for too long,
she would feel superior, vindicated,
when they walked away, their feet
carrying the same weight as before,
because their wallets were no lighter,
and their hearts had not been touched.
In these moments, she would remember her own feet,
tiny like those of a Japanese princess,
so slender she needed the elusive Slim,
and she would bury her hatred of them
in the shoe boxes, like coffins,
that lined the shelves of her sanctum,
the place where they were never allowed,
the room where she would disappear,
keeping them in her power for a few minutes,
checking on whether she had it,
the sequined pump, the black spike heel,
the Italian loafer, the ruby-red slippers
that would work their charms, cast their spells,
whisk them from lowly earth to the highest clouds,
if only she could produce it, in 8 1/2 AAA.
Sometimes, she would keep them in suspense,
pretending she had overlooked it, bringing out
boxes of others, unsuitable to their dreams:
navy-blue walking shoes, heavy-soled wing tips,
solid Oxfords when they asked for pastel sandals.
Sometimes she even convinced them that these were what
they wanted--she dropped words like cushioned impact
and fallen arches--and they nodded, worried,
frowning a bit as they agreed to take them.
But these were the ones she despised the most,
they were too easy, pushovers in their fallen nylons,
and when she retired, after thirty-eight years,
she spent most of her time barefoot in her garden,
all the shoe boxes in her house dusty except one,
which contained the only thing she had ever wanted:
cerise patent leathers with satin bows,
still one size too large for their owner.

:: Holly Hildebrand, in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Poems, Stories, and Photographs

Calling Out the Days

2011-07-11T12:45:00.000-04:00

Click here to read Lois Williams' poem (and a fiction excerpt) at the Gist Street online archives.

Love of Lines: Notes for an Apprentice Shingler

2011-07-04T12:45:00.000-04:00

The injuries are small ones,
the blade slips from the cedar
slat to the kneeling knee,
or the plane slides
off the shingle's edge
and shaves the thumb's knuckle.
Splinters are surprisingly
rare, but when the hands
are cold, the hammer glances
the galvanized nail
and slams the horny one,
pinching and blistering
the pellicle. This
is the worst.

What we labor over,
a swayback beach house,
rests on a rheumatic wharf,
our task to pluck
the worn wood scales,
add new bridgework, a shield
of George Washington teeth,
clamped against adversity.
We begin with the shingle iron
slipping it all along the virgin
backside of loose dentures,
and pull so sjakes fly off
in our faces, crack and splinter,
the sharp dry notes narrating
fifteen-plus years of weather.
Like dog years, this is ancient
beyond thinning and brittleness.
Where we find rot, we chisel out
the grainy porridge and fill
the gap with new pine,
thick wedges for warmth.

Wood chips in our eyes
make us cry a little,
but mostly we keep right on
through the small disasters
to batten down before nightfall,
our eyes on the suture--
horizon stitching low
grey sky to our dark Atlantic.
Tar paper (or a new slick
synthetic stock that doesn't rip
and bears a name too New Age
for song) is whack-stapled
to weary ship-salvage boards,
top layer always over bottom
to keep rain water from seeping
back to wood. Then the sweet
new cedar shields we extract
from fresh bundles and fit,
side flush to side
and hammer in twice, milk
oozing from glat four-penny
heads, the soft white fur
of mold, like premature infant
fuzz, rising from wet wood
into the crisp autumn
turn of air.

Chalk lines are best
when workers hold each end,
on ereaching to the center
to snap, the blue powder
mapping a million points
along a line so straight
the day's doubts are deleted
in its sure direction.
But a course of shingles
followed by another and another
parading up the house--these
hands saluting, soles of tree,
puerile soldiers sweet
as puberty, pressed side to side
so no one stands taller,
though some are fatter,
"hippos," and some are "weasel"--
thin, their bodies set
like brickwork so no two seams
meet--all the bathos of the week
is buried here. Lines
link lines to what we love
in these long hours, the wood
wine of it, the weighted plunge
and smack of hammer and nail,
the hard grip, hammer handle
to palm, the knock knock knock
answering back from neighboring
houses and street, wood and nail
and wood, even the smeared blood
marking the rough facade.
We swing and drum the day.

*

And when we finish, the lines,
stacks of horizons, paths to
an exacting place, meeting at trim
and window, foundation and roof,
are what we've made. Lines
where cold, rain, wind,
sleet, sun and snow end. Lines
we step across the street
to judge, and when they're fine
they're fine, and when they fail
they haunt. Order is easy to
plan for, hard to achieve. This
is what houses are about--
planes that meet along degrees
we trust. Lines that say,
The weather is up to you.

We unfasten our nail aprons
as the sun sends its light
into China's day. Toss
into the toolbox tape measure,
plane and knife,
hammer, chalkline and coping
saw, and head home to husband
or girlfriend or dog, or house--
house, bless it, though it
doesn't save us from ourselves.
And when we sleep, it is
the sleep of lines well made,
or lines that are not well,
marginally mis-measured,
but in our dreams slanting
earthward or rising toward
some inevitable convergence,
the confusion of infinite touch,
and so we return to the house
and remove by glance alone,
five fresh courses
to correct our quarter-inch mistake.

When we wake, the error
dissolves into morning,
compulsion keeling into
the undefined plane of day
and its incorrigible knots.
In a year the high wheat
of the wood will fade to blue-grey,
the seams will open a crack,
for the wood has dried and shrunk.
The smell, once fecund as forests,
will be salted, and somewhere else
staging assembled, a house
stripped, a dog amused
at what trouble humans go to,
dangling their booted feet
at the face of a house
as the hammers hound the quiet
of day, as the afternoon arcs
around our deep imperfections,
and we measure with expectation
another course, another line.

:: Sara London, The Tyranny of Milk

Kitchen Sink

2011-06-27T12:45:00.003-04:00

Today she would change nothing,
not even the walpaper peeling
like dead bark. Nor, outside, the shadows
approaching the yard where ants
toil like women in their houses of sand.
Never mind that the sun will be setting.

When she was young she felt afraid
of hard wind and the rain that unsettled the creek.
But the earth never left her,
not once did the floods reach her feet.
The reward of a long life is faith

in what's left. Dishes stacked on a strong table.
Jars of dried beans. Scraps of cloth.
And the ten thousand things of her own thoughts,
incessant as creek water. She has been able

to lay up her treasures on earth,
as if heaven were here, worth believing.
In the water her hands reach
like roots accustomed to living,

the roots of the cat-briar that hold to the hillside
and can never be torn free of this earth completely.

:: Kathryn Stripling Byer, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest

I'm Standing in Line

2011-06-20T12:45:00.008-04:00

I'm standing in line
for unemployment compensation
a long line that ropes around the room
waiting my turn
and hating it
because the clerk
who stands at the window hour after hour
or works at a desk squeezed between desks
in a mustard-colored room
with low ceilings and fluorescent lights
and no windows
the clerk makes it feel like a handout.

I go home and do laundry
and pick tomatoes for a salad
and when the children come home from school
late as usual and with long explanations
I sit and listen
and have a cup of tea while they have milk
and we talk about what they did today
and watch the cardinal
the one with the short flat crest
eat the stale bread in the driveway.

And next day I clean the fridge
and mop the kitchen floor
and when I get tired then or later
or fed up with housework
I sit by the window with a cup of tea
and watch the trees beginning to change
and the light with them
and tell myself that what you do
is not as important as how you live.
I could be that clerk
working in a mustard-colored box
making people feel like dirt.

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

"U.S. Unemployed Jumps to 12 Million"

2011-06-13T12:45:00.017-04:00

Colocamos em caixas

     Convertidos en cajas
          We have become boxes

empilhadas uma a outra
     una encima de otra
          stacked on top of each other

esperando serem abertas.
     esperando que nos abran.
          waiting to be opened.

Nos preguntamos se o Free
     Preguntamos si el Free
          We ask if the Free

Grand slam inclui
     Grand Slam incluye
          Grand Slam includes

suco. Despertamos durante a noite
     jugo. Despertamos en la noche
          juice. We awake in the night

adicionando e subtraindo
     sumando y restando
          adding and subtracting

os cabelos nas nossas cabeças.
     los pelos de nuestras cabezas.
          the hairs on our heads.

Somos cardacos
     Somos cordones
          We are shoelaces

amarrado duas vezes,
     atados dos veces,
          double knotted,

esperando não quebrar.
     esperando que no nos rompamos.
          hoping not to break.

:: Abigail Templeton, in Rattle #33, Summer 2010

Tobacco Men

2011-06-06T12:45:00.001-04:00

Late fall finishes the season for marketing:
Auctioneers babble to growers and buyers.
Pickups convoy on half-flat tires, tobacco
Piled in burlap sheets, like heaped-up bedding
When sharecropper families move on in November,
No one remembers the casualties
Of July's fighting against tim ein the sun.
Boys bent double for sand lugs, bowed
Like worshippers before the fertilized stalks.
The rubber-plant leaves glared savagely as idols.

It is I, who fled such fields, who must
Reckon up losses: Walter fallen out from heat,
Bud Powell nimble along rows as a scatback
But too light by September, L. G. who hoisted up a tractor
To prove he was better, while mud his his feet--
I've lost them in a shimmer that makes the rows move crooked.

Wainwright welded the wagons, weighed three
Hundred pounds, and is dead. Rabbit was mechanic
When not drunk, and Arthur best ever at curing.
Good old boys together--maybe all three still there,
Drinking in a barn, their moonshine clearer than air
Under fall sky impenetrable as a stone named for azure.

I search for your faces in relation
To a tobacco stalk I can see,
One fountain of up-rounding leaf.
It looms, expanding, like an oak.
Your faces form fruit where branches are forking.
Like the slow-motion explosion of a thunderhead,
It is sucking the horizon to a bruise.

A cloud's high forehead wears ice.

:: James Applewhite, Following Gravity

Contemporary Announcement

2011-05-30T12:15:00.008-04:00

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

2011-05-23T12:45:00.006-04:00

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

2011-05-16T12:45:00.003-04:00

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

2011-05-09T12:45:00.001-04:00

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

2011-05-02T12:45:00.000-04:00

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

Shaper

2011-04-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

In the days when I was training
on the Griggio in Blaise's shop,
all metric and fabulous, with dials and rings
and a brake, electromagnetic, meant
to simplify setup (it didn't), I was always
wrangling against the power feeder, trying
to keep straight what was cope and what
was stick, how to run cock bead with the face
on the fence, whether to bolt the tenon clamp
on the ball-bearing table before or after
I pinned the miter gauge in place.

It was crazymaking. I loathed the machine
as I had loved Thorn's simple, elegant
Powermatic of Delphine Avenue, Waynesboro.
I'd get all shaky and gun-shy and couldn't stand
to have to fix the shaper steel between
the lock-knife collars and tweak them
into their perfect little circles of scotia, bolection,
astragal. But what I did like--this

is the thing of it, finally--was that the cutterhead
was so big, and the column of air it started moving
so massive, that simply by opening one's mouth
and moving the lips in and out in larger or smaller shapes
of "O," one sang with a voice not one's own, and whistled.
Like blowing across the neck of a bottle, but weirder.
It was as though a harmonic existed in the back of the throat
along a string drawn tight by the work of the shaper:
to remove whatever is not the thing desired of it,
the carbide cutter, after all, formed in the shape of matter
one can do without. In the end familiarity
bred contempt, and my fear, which was vast,
gave way to convenience: nothing bad kept happening.
We turned out acres and acres of frame-and-panel,
and I got paid my wage. Still always played
the mouth-game, even after the wonder of it,
and the oddity, blew away like so much swarf
through the dust-pipe, down the cyclone, to the drop-box,
filling bins and bins and bins and bins and bins.

:: John Casteen, in Ploughshares 29:4 (Winter 2003-04)

Shifting Piles

2011-04-18T12:45:00.012-04:00

I place a pile of credits to my left
and a pile of debits to my right.
After I type the numbers from the debits
onto the credits
I pile the debits on top of the credits.
Then I pull the carbons from the credits
and separate the copies into piles.
I interfile the piles
and bring them over to the files
where I file the piles and pull the files
making a new file of piles.
Then I make files
for the pile that has no files
and put them into a new file pile.
I take the new file pile down the aisle
over to the table where Mabel
makes labels for April to staple.
I take the new labeled stapled file pile
back down the aisle over to the file
to be interfiled with the pile of filed files.
After I file April's piles
I get new debits from Debby
and new credits from Kerry.
I carry Kerry's credits and Debby's debits
back to my desk
and place a pile of credits to my left
and a pile of debits to my right.

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

Everything I Learned from Start-Ups

2011-04-11T12:45:00.000-04:00

Senior management does not care about you.
Customer service is another axiom for following the Golden Rule.
There are never enough hours in the day to do your job properly.
Management will never hire enough quality people.
Document, document, document.
C.Y.A. (Cover Your Ass).
You can't do your work and go to meetings.
If you are in meetings for more than half your day, quit.
Quit when you are required to wear shoes.
Quit when the free stuff isn't.
Quit when you do the job and your boss takes the credit.
Quit when your boss is fired for politics.
Quit when management hires a consulting agency to optimize the process.
Quit when you get the feeling it's time.
Quit and management will finally offer you what you are worth,
offer you the job that you really want.
Stock options are just options.
Golden handcuffs are only handcuffs if you let them be.
The promise of money is just a word.
Not given in earnest.
Go back to school with the stocks and bonuses.
Take something you enjoy.
Leave the industry and never look back.

:: Laura Lehew, in Work

Day Labor

2011-04-04T12:45:00.000-04:00

Every Saturday when I come to work
my dirty windows look out on the street
where very short men wait for jobs
to offer themselves up.
At eight in the morning they are standing
on the sidewalk, their bicycles
Huffy and Mongoose
chained to a speed limit sign.
They wear baseball caps
and have silver-capped
front teeth.
By ten they are sitting in a line.
On the narrow sidewalk, they wait.
When their jobs drive up in late model trucks
the scramble begins--
knocking on windows, whistling,
and fingers in the air.
Only one or two will get it
out of the fifteen men who do this every morning.
The rest disperse.
The hot coffee burns my tongue.

:: Ileanna Portillo, in Work

The Needle Trade

2011-03-28T12:45:00.007-04:00

The tailor--
hunched over cutting tables--
sketched designs,
chalked fabrics

and the finisher--
her needle tracing the Polish alphabet--
basted, hemmed the fine linen,
and sewed you together.

Then, in our days of loose threads,
just as your father sewed
buttons on suits to tighten
those hanging loose,

just as your mother patched
worn fabric and mended ripped
seams where thread frayed
or came undone, you

chose the proper needle,
the strength of thread
and with such skill
stitched the two of us
together.

And we, in turn, shape
patterns of our sons until
they grasp the chalk
to craft their own designs.

:: Ruth Daigon, Between One Future and the Next (Papier-Mache Press, 1995)

Reasonable Facsimile

2011-03-21T12:45:00.005-04:00

The ghost of me walk these halls
shadowing in and out
of my fluorescent cube.
Elusive fingers reaching at me
leave only traces of my mind
to function here.
The work performs itself;
the words are spoken without me;
and even those who call me friend
do not know
that I was never here.

:: Bonnie Michael Pratt, in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Poetry, Fiction, and Photographs

The A & P

2011-03-14T12:45:00.062-04:00

She rolled a tomato in her hand, pink rubber
ball engineered to fit a machine. The motion
recalled Florida, toward the Glades, Pahokee,
Belle Glade, Miccosukee, fields crawling
with tomato plants, and the proportion all wrong
between the rows: wide enough for a truck to drive
through. A truckload of migrant workers, Cuban,
Haitian, Jamaican, perhaps Creek, Seminole,
turning, rolling to a spot on the horizon, stopping
somewhere, the next unpicked spot the same,
on the row, assembly line.

                                             A voice from somewhere
                  urban, in her ear: We have forgotten where
                  our food comes from.

                                                         But she remembered exactly.
      Between the rows of manufactured produce she remembered
      Lib Martin's bucket of tomatoes: green, red,
      irregular skin cracked like red dirt, drought,
      rain. The acid juice gushed against thirst.

Not forgetting. Learning certain things, like these sweet
potatoes, knobbed roots broken to yellow clay,
eating them baked as some ate clay, hot
from the sun, comfort. Sweet potatoes twenty cents a pound.

A man in Nash County died digging them last fall,
forty cents a bucket, seventy buckets a day, take out
a hundred fifty bucks a month for beans and rice.

                  Pull wild salad, fish the Tar River, drink
                  cheap wine, a dollar a pint. Can't escape,
                  beaten with tree limbs, the woods full of snakes. Be
                  so hot. Fall into dirt from your own digging, and die.

Not about forgetting. Never being told.

        Eating the lives of others like a child, unconscious,
        sucking the breast. Herself as a girl sucking
        sugar cane by the gas heater, hot, sweet,
        knowing nothing of the cold field, the knives of cane,
        the women and the men, rounding the mill like mules.

But it was about forgetting. Every day she wanted to
forget something she'd learned about the house, the fields,
the lopped cedar posts propping up the scuppernong arbor,
the fallen grapes fermenting on the ground. If she could have,
just tonight, a little white wine. The amnesiac sugar,
liquor, how good it tastes. It used to be whiskey,
or a little rum-and-coke.

                                            How drunk she got
         that night, her and the two men, drunk, standing up
         in the boat between two rivers of stars, between
         the muddy banks of the Black Warrior.
                                                                          They sang
         until the boat sank, then waded out as if
         free in another country. She'd washed the black muck
         off her feet, clinging weight, erosion, lives
         she knew, lives she did not know. She had walked
         up the bank, stagger, not like her father. Just like
         her father. What did he know?

                                                                Too much, her mother said,
                 he knows too much to be happy.

                                                                            Drinking to forget
         what he did, or what he should have done? At the river,
         the river bottom land.

                                                      Maybe the grapefruit in her hand,
          yellow globe, pink flesh, came from there, prison farm
          in the bottoms. Hot boxes. Boxes of fruit. Each piece
          wrapped like a jewel in green tissue paper.

She had learned about grapefruit, lemons, oranges.
In the store, workers unpack them like presents. Pesticide
spreads skin to skin, and your hands begin to die,
go numb, skin falls off, membrane of a peeled orange.

                   Stay conscious, a voice said. Can't do nothing if you don't
                   stay conscious. Right foot should know what the left foot is doing.

But every time, every damn time, she walked
into this A & P to get groceries, she had to decide
not to be like her father. Decide like tonight.
No grapefruit, no tomatoes, none of that Iowa honey,
bees that never saw a flower, their universe a warehouse.
Ask where the sweet potatoes came from. Then a few
in a paper sack, thudding like lumps of dirt.

Then her feet up and down the aisles twice as wide
as a row should be hoed, making her feet take her
past, her hand not reach down a bottle, not even
the scuppernong that could give her back herself
innocent, under the arbor, sucking grapes down
to the skin, the familiar taste, numbness, a long
slow spiral down the river, oblivion's boat,
her feet never stepping out on either side of land.

She made herself walk past the wine, to check-out,
to figure up how much this food would cost her.
She could dig up the backyard again this spring,
some rows of tomatoes, some cane poles spiraling
bean vines. Some squash, three seeds and a fish head
at the bottom of each hole.
                                               The dead silver eye
would look at her again. Again she would ask herself
the use of what she was doing, and again as she hoed,
barefoot in blackjack clay, and as the tomatoes came in
to be picked, eaten, given to friends, canned for winter.
Again as the blisters came, and then the calluses on her hands.

:: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Walking Back Up Depot Street (Pittsburgh, 1999)

The Talk

2011-03-07T12:45:00.002-05:00

In the dark square wooden room at noon
the mother had a talk with her daughter.
The rudeness could not go on, the meanness
to her little brother, the selfishness.
The 8-year-old sat on her bed
in the corner of the room, her irises dark as
the last drops of something, her firm
face melting, reddening,
silver flashes in her eyes like distant
bodies of water glimpsed through woods.
She took it and took it and broke, crying out
I hate being a person! diving
into the mother
as if
into
a deep pond--and the child cannot swim,
the child cannot swim.

:: Sharon Olds, Satan Says (Pittsburgh, 1990)

Working While Others Sleep

2011-02-28T12:45:00.009-05:00

I love with a secret joy to watch
over the sick as they sleep--the
halls tunneling into darkness, the doctors
banished at last to their beds, the
night opening like a desert before me.

I enter the room, flashlight
dead in my hand, and there the moon dances
on four silent faces.
How beautiful you all are.
Even you Mr. Willoughby, face divided
in day by bitterness, a mind unforgiving
of its body, even you
can't help yourself fall
like an infant angel into the
lap of the mother.
Your face on the pillow, a
flower, can no longer hide the
tenderness you've denied ever having.

And you McPhee, your creased hand crooked
in the corner of your neck,
fingers curled like a fiddlehead around
some forest shadow. I want
to slip my hand in yours and
feel the river of dreams returning.

But Henry, you are my favorite,
in sleep you fall so far that
every time I hear you take in the night
and then give it back
I leave the room brimming
with the mystery of sleeping life.

:: Alicia Priest, in Paperwork: Contemporary Poems from the Job (Harbour, 1991)

Bad

2011-02-21T12:45:00.002-05:00

night at the taco house
he came in to rob the place
the waitresses were flush with fear and tears
the guys sat around yammering
what he was doing caused some kind of disruption
he beckoned. i went over to his corner
he put the gun to my head, said
"empty the register"
the kiss deep hard cold against my temple
there was a click sound
if i move sudden i'm dead, i thought
and if i hesitate this clown might off me
nd so i said, "shoot motherfucka or quit wasting my time"
there was surprised silence
then everyone broke into strained laughter
"it's a joke," he said, "you didn't cry like the other girls"
and there were slaps on the back and
cracks about my ice cool
and from that day till the day i quit
everybody kept their distance

:: Wanda Coleman, African Sleeping Sickness (Black Sparrow, 1990)

Wifery

2011-02-14T12:45:00.008-05:00

After the gentle click of the latch behind him
the house readjusts to a new order,
its details trembling on a string of lists:
walk to market, walk to cleaners, start stew.
She is testing a life as readymade for her
as love, how the shape of someone's
shoulders suddenly comes to mean this much;
this far and no farther. With utter
certainty she crushes the iced slush underfoot
in a morning as wide-open and delicate as
the mouth of a teacup: she must have
12 small white onions, she must have
bleeding cubes of stewing beef, and cream
of tartar for biscuits. The summer night they met
she said, I can't cook, I don't cook.
Now in winter the blade makes neat work
of her lie, quartering potatoes
glistening in their nudity, filling the simmering
pot to its fragrant hissing lip.

:: Suzanne Matson, Durable Goods (Alice James, 1993)

Jean and Jules Work at the Queen of Peace Nursing Home

2011-02-07T12:45:00.016-05:00

They never had more in common
in all their forty years.
Now they both take care of people
just a little older than themselves,
fry their eggs, wash their dishes.
My mother's wide peasant feet
tramp up and down that huge industrial kitchen
run by nuns. She is amazed
by her own power, the enormity
of the breakfasts she produces--
125 eggs cracked and fried
and stacks of pancakes towering over her.
She has to use a stool to reach
the shiny aluminum stove with its beaming burners.
My father's engineer's hands
slosh it up in the dishroom
once or twice a week where he
craftily slides plates
from soapy water to dryer
patiently explaining to his dishroom partner, Sonny,
there is a method.
On Christmas eve
they take us on a tour of the kitchen,
and introduce us to the nuns
who are stunned Jean and Jules
have such grown up children.
And then they introduce us to the old people
who fall asleep standing up
or drool staring at us.
It's a strange parade up and down
the antiseptic halls,
my mother leading, the brisk short walk
of a short woman determined not to finish last,
my father bringing up the rear,
the stern assertion
of a man who has triumphed.

:: Julia Lisella, in For a Living: The Poetry of Work

Cow Song

2011-01-31T12:45:00.000-05:00

My sleep rolls through the hust of crickets' purr
to find split girth, birth's note stalking my dark room.
Father slips on boots as her sound consumes
our squarish house. I am getting older.
I do as I'm told. The cow's tongue slurs,
one blue slack leg dangling from her womb.
He steps through the springer's black perfume
and palm to belly, checks for breath, the stir.
The hooked moon shifts through redwoods as danger
lodges, sifts in his hand. Tight lips spill
stifled goddamns while dark hooves scrape their lists.
He goes in arm-length with slip-noosed hanger
to loosen young shoulder from hip. Cow song fills
the silver pail. The shotgun sits and sits.

:: Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, in Crab Orchard Review (2006)

12:02 p.m.

2011-01-24T12:45:00.000-05:00

briefcases
under armpits
hold lunches
instead of briefs

squashed egg salad
sandwiches
two cookies
a hundred caolorie apiece

fine leathers
zippered
alligatored
they look so couth
brown paper bags

they look so un

:: Doris Vanderlipp Manley, in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Poetry, Fiction, and Photographs

Found Money

2011-01-17T12:45:00.017-05:00

Almost every day I find
a penny on the street.
And if the penny faces up
I call it luck.
And if it's down
I call it money.

When I was young
I helped my mom clean a store at night
after her regular job.
I'd spray counters with ammonia
that went up my nose and stung my eyes
then rub away the fingerprints
with a soft cloth.
I'd scrape gum from the floors
and hold the pan as she swept
in dust and black dirt.

Sometimes I'd find coins in the dressing room.
I even found a dollar
behind a row of gowns.
No matter if I found a dollar or a dime
Mom made me leave it with a note
on the big wooden register.

Once I found a wallet
on the floor of a movie theater.
No name. No pictures. Only money.
Even in the dark I could see
it was red, smooth plastic red.
I looked at my mother
and she looked away.

Almost every day I find
a penny on the street.
And if the penny faces up
I call it luck.
And if it's down
I call it money.

:: Patti Tana, in If I Had a Hammer: Women's Work in Poetry, Fiction, and Photographs (1990, Papier-Mache Press)

Shade

2011-01-10T17:20:00.001-05:00

Are these the same trees or the children of the trees that used to be
here? Nothing changes space more than trees. They rest us. At dusk,
exhausted & streaked with dirt, we sit beneath trees with slices of
melon. We joke. We sing. I never knew the farmer liked to sing till I
got old & he told me. Why would you hide this from a child? Singing
was his hope. In my family when people did not get what they
wanted, they walked out a door & stared at the horizon. They sang
too. My mother sang in English & my father sang in Arabic. They
disappeared for awhile or trimmed a tree with long clippers. Better
than hitting. Better than cursing or drinking I guess. I sat in the cool
den under the pine trees between my house & Barbara's house. The
farmer's grandfather used to own our street too. Our street was once
part of this farm. When I find Barbara this trip she says, "I don't
remember you so much. I remember your brother." In the old days
while everybody was secretly singing I hiked to the farm. Talked to
trees along the way. Told them our troubles. Purchased lima beans
for my mother. Asked for okra & Caroline folded the top of the bag
so neatly. As if she didn't have thousands of things to do.

:: Naomi Shihab Nye, in Five Points 3:2, Winter 1999

Industrial League Bowling

2011-01-03T12:45:00.034-05:00

Treva's husband throws a strike
every time he's up. She quit school
at fourteen, but Treva does the numbers
like a mathematician: ten plus ten plus
ten plus ten to three hundred at the last frame.
She works first shift sewing machine

at Stedman's. He sands for Dixie Furniture,
but Dixie couldn't make a team, so he's on
with Stedman's by marriage, the ringer.
Their two kids come to Tuesday league night.
They'll know the ball like their own bones
long before they start at the mill.

When Treva's up, she wipes hands on her skirt,
tugs her blue-striped bowling shirt
--the company logo printed on the back--
vees petite fingers in her six-pounder,
and throws. Seven down. Three more for a spare.
Tonight Klopman's eases ahead after the first game.

Steadman's a strong second. Bossong's best
was called in early for a machine repair,
and they're a weak third without him.
Then it's Harrelson Rubber, Acme-McCrary,
Pinehurst, in that order. When your day
is the up-down-up-down arm of a needle

in cloth, a twenty minute lunch,
when you're bad to slip stitches or tangle thread,
and your boss lives in the white house
so big your cousins drive to town just to see it,
you own the ball or you die. This
will save you: the necessary roar of the roll

down the alley, wild scatter of the hit,
a boy setting pins and sending balls
back to hands that can spin, slide, knuckle, toss,
that can make split pins fall, hands
with grease in their creases, grease under nails,
sewer's hands with thread burns scarred into palms.

:: Barbara Presnell, Piece Work (Cleveland State, 2007)

Father, His Friend, and Another

2010-12-27T12:45:00.000-05:00

Father’s friend Ray at the planing mill
worked wood the color of afternoon air,
curls of it clasping everything there—
like the legs of the saw that mumbled at first,
and then the white shriek through birch.

While the two talked I felt the boards,
yellow and smooth, and uncurled rolls
of handshaved pine, put them like rings
around my arm to wear them home.
My father said, “Sure, leave them on.”

As we started for home Father told me
that another man when they were all young
was close to them, and they sang in church.
When the other man died Ray ran out
to the country and hid, from grief—two days.

I remember that clutch, and I wave again
back through the sun at Father’s friend.

:: William Stafford, in Brother Songs: A Male Anthology of Poetry (1979)

Self-Inquiry Before the Job Interview

2010-12-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

Did you sneeze?
Yes, I rid myself of the imposter inside me.

Did you iron your shirt?
Yes, I used the steam of mother's hate.

Did you wash your hands?
Yes, I learned my hygiene from a raccoon.

I prayed on my knees, and my knees answered with pain.
I gargled. I polished my shoes until I saw who I was.
I inflated my resume by employing my middle name.

I walked to my interview, early,
The sun like a ring on an electric stove.
I patted my hair when I entered the wind of a revolving door.
The guard said, For a guy like you, it's the 19th floor.

The economy was up. Flags whipped in every city plaza
In America. This I saw for myself as I rode the elevator,
Empty because everyone had a job but me.

Did you clean your ears?
Yes, I heard my fate in the drinking fountain's idiotic drivel.

Did you slice a banana into your daily mush?
I added a pinch of salt, two raisins to sweeten my breath.

Did you remember your pen?
I remembered my fingers when the elevator opened.

I shook hands that dripped like a dirty sea.
I found a chair and desk. My name tag said my name.
Through the glass ceiling, I saw the heavy rumps of CEOs.
Outside my window, the sun was a burning stove,
All of us pushing papers
To keep it going.

:: Gary Soto, in Poetry (July 2001)

Masterful

2010-12-13T12:45:00.001-05:00

Though it's a city job, Carlos isn't wearing
his orange vest and yellow hardhat,
but clomps around in tan ranchero hat
and washed-out denim shirt. The foreman
warns him once again, as he must, and Carlos
swears he won't forget again tomorrow.
He straps himself into the motor grader,
skims a glove across the black knobs,
and eases forth with a mule-driver's patience,
leveling truck-dumped piles of raw fill
smoother than the sea of Cortez.
Maybe it's a gift, such effortless grace,
such seamless union of man and machine,
and maybe it's a sign how every morning,
punctual as the lunch truck with its
shave-and-a-haircut horn, he kills the engine,
clambers down, struts up close to a massive
chevron-treaded tire and just starts peeing,
as though the whole site weren't naked
as a soccer field, boxed along three sides
by green glass towers. Not that it matters--
the soil he darkens will be asphalted over
soon enough, and even now, here comes
the water-tank truck, spewing like a fire plug
wrenched open in the mid-city heat.
Small hot-pink pennants still mark
the heavy conduit we sank just yesterday,
and we've got planks on edge, framing
where the walkway's going to be.
The cement mixer inches up, its great drum
putting like a clock hand teasing toward the hour.
And Hector levers the crusty sluice above
the ready beds, the newsprint-colored mortar
plopping like horseshit to the ground.
And Manny makes quick work of it, his trowel
and squeegee broom drawing it so tight,
a dropped dime would roll to a standing stop
and never topple over. There is a thin line
between miracle and mastery. Even
Carlos stands, hat off with the rest of us,
nodding as with subtle understanding.

:: Gabriel Spera, in Cimarron Review (summer 2007)

The Insomniac's Pet Shop

2010-12-06T12:45:00.000-05:00

I have no use for cages.
They can copulate wherever
they want. By moonlight, I clean
the dead canary of the birdseed
it is lying in. Pluck the pretty
feathers--the azures and the yellow-
greens. I keep one sign facing
inward: Thank you ... Come Again ...

The SPECIAL OF THE MONTH
is rat and roach
for lovers of the scuttle
and the heavy gait. With Chopin
on the antique phonograph
I savor the skips and scratches;
waltz with the white toy poodle
who sleeps in the wire cell by the window.

In my pet-shop, the fish tank
is covered with a hairy-green
algae no one can see through.
To buy a goldfish from me
is an act of faith. And maybe,
like your own prayer for rest,
you'll hear the tiny diver
calling you from the bottom.

:: Peter Marcus, in Agni #37

On a Seven-Day Diary

2010-11-29T12:45:00.010-05:00

Oh, I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate and talked and went to sleep.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
from work and ate and slept.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate and watched a show and slept.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and worked and came back home
and ate steak and went to sleep.
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
and ate and fucked and went to sleep.
Then it was Saturday, Saturday, Saturday!
Love must be the reason for the week!
We went shopping! I saw clouds!
The children explained everything!
I could talk about the main thing!
What did I drink on Saturday night
that lost the first, best half of Sunday?
The last half wasn't worth this "word."
Then I got up and went to work
and worked and came back home
from work and ate and went to sleep,
refreshed but tired from the weekend.

:: Alan Dugan

From Up North Architecht William Strickland Designs the New Orleans Mint, 1832

2010-11-22T12:45:00.000-05:00

After the Capitol, Naval Home

and a Mint in Philadelphia     another Mint

was a zipzap draw-it-in-your-sleep-
and-sign-your-name-er. New Orleans

fortunate      to be favored
with a Strickland plan     perfect

for the rocksoil of Philly where
it would have stood up straight.

For more than a century and a half
Delta tradesmen     had work.

:: Susan Eisenberg, Pioneering: Poems from the Construction Site (1998)

Downsizing

2010-11-15T12:45:00.003-05:00

Rumors are getting around,
you’ve heard them. Little things
in the hallway—
one too many jokes
about the company stock,
and the bosses whispering
at the water cooler.
Notice the secretaries,
how little they talk now,
they always know. And the offices upstairs
stay lit all night—and don’t tell me
it means nothing
that the junior executives
who hate each other
are going to lunch together.
It won’t be long. Some lucky bastard
is about to get fired.

:: David Tucker, Late for Work (2006)

Because They Are Not Eight

2010-11-08T12:45:00.010-05:00

Ronnie gave up on his folks before
he was ten and signed on two days after
he graduated from high school. His mother
would pour the ashy, treacly scotch
until her head was swarming with rattles
and growls and recrimination. If she wasn’t

strapping Ronnie’s ass in a blind lather
she was trying to get some off him. His father,
Jerome, was gone most every night, cruising
parks, men’s rooms and adult movie houses.
Mornings Ronnie would hear him in the shower,
bathroom steamier than heaven, singing and gasping

sobs by turns. He just started talking to me when
they were shearing us in bunches, clumps
of sandy brown, black, and rusty hair
splotching dingy yellow linoleum. Heaping
in small drifts. Some trippy inane shit he said
made me laugh though I couldn’t tell you why.
My precious mane! My masculine fortitude!
Like some kind of eulogy for Caesar.

I never thought of it as mine anymore
after it was cut. And you always get more.
We bunked together. Closed the taverns in port.
They gave us watch duty on deck beginning
an hour before the next day. Creaming
night waves were ragged claps of wet
voltage teasing your mind into a graceful

stupor. It was steady and soothing and Ronnie
and me would unwind. Nothing mattered
to him I think. The way a lost balloon
meanders and bobs. Tangles and glides. Ronnie
asked me why sometimes sailors are called gobs.
I said he should ask the captain. He cradled
my neck, hooking his lips into mine.

I caught him with a rabbit punch and he yelped
and bayed. Shaking back to his feet with raucous
guffaws he kissed me again with blood in his
mouth. I spat into the hollow of his chest and cried
some, punching his shoulders and arms. I said,
“It’s okay for you first,” and he got in after three

fingers and rubbed my belly whispering, singing
Sinatra (Summer Wind) and I was frail and genuine
suddenly under hushy symphony of leaking light
thinking of my grandma’s riddle: Why are the seven
stars no more than seven? I don’t care if he wakes me

for a slip trip ‘cause I get my chance at bat as often
as I like. Ronnie can turn cook’s duty for three
hundred guys into a fucking privilege. Swabbing
toilets a jokey tango for the deranged. Sometimes
he just climbs into my bunk and tells me gags
‘til we fall asleep. I do not ask God why

He brought me Ronnie. Prince of tickles
in a kingdom of the damaged and ravenous.
Doctor for the annihilated bounce. I heard
once in church deserving has nothing
to do with grace. And I figure it’s better
not to raise the question.

:: Christopher Soden, in Still Blue: More Writing by (for or about) Working-Class Queers

Condition of the Working Classes: 1970

2010-11-06T12:45:00.012-04:00

You United States, frightened by dreams of Guatemala,

building houses with eight-mile-long wings to imprison the Cubans,
eating a bread made of the sound of sunken buffalo bones,
drinking water turned dark by the shadow of Negroes.
You remember things seen when you were still able to speak—
white wings lying in a field.
And when you try to pass a bill,
long boards fly up, suddenly,
in Nevada,
in ghost towns.

You wave your insubstantial food timidly in the damp air.
You long to return to the shell.
Even at the start Chicago was a place where the cobblestones
got up and flew around at night,
and anarchists fainted as they read The Decline and Fall.
The ground is soaked with water they used to boil dogs.

Your sons dream they have been lost in kinky hair,
no one can find them,
neighbors walk shoulder to shoulder for three days,
but your sons are lost in the immense forest.

And the harsh deer drop,
the businessmen climb into their F-4s,
the chocks are knocked out,
the F-4 shoots off the deck,
          trailing smoke,
dipping slightly,
          as if haunted by the center of the ocean,
then pulling up again, as Locke said it would.

Our spirit is in the baseball rising into the light

So the crippled ships go out into the deep,
sexual orchids fly out to meet the rain,
          the singer sings from deep in his chest,
memory stops,
          black threads string out in the wind,
the eyes of the nation go blind.

The building across the street suddenly explodes,
wild horses run through the long hair on the ground floor.
Cripple Creek’s survivors peer out from an upper-story window,
          blood pours from their ears,
the Sioux dead sleep all night in the rain troughs on the Treasury
          Building.

The moonlight crouches over the teenager’s body thrown from a car

The weeping child like a fish thrown from the herring block
the black-nosed Avenger leaping off the deck

Women who hear the cry of small animals in their furs
and drive their cars at a hundred miles an hour into trees

:: Robert Bly, in Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life

Condition of the Working Classes: 1960

2010-11-05T12:45:00.001-04:00

There are bricks trapped in thousands of pale homes,

And pale children who in time will vote Republican,
Who sleep at night with black stones beneath their pillows;
I have seen cars ascending into the heavens,
Where their fenders turn slowly to drifting clouds;
Driving down the streets, we see the faces of children
Change suddenly into the doors of aircraft factories,
That are far off the street, behind grass, with a blue door;
And the doors change at night into small holes in paper
Behind which the blue sky is seen; and the sky changes
          to decks of cards
Thrown down on a cardtable at midnight, and locked
          away in boxes,
And the paper boxes change to chunks of pine standing
          beneath axles
In lazy garages where the wooden floors are stained with oil,
And the extricated axles change to missiles with warheads
Climbing up, and the stages changes into aisles of a church,
And the church-doors change into the faces of children
          standing beside the new trees.

:: Robert Bly, in Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life

Right Now

2010-11-01T12:45:00.003-04:00

you're out in a village in the Berkshires
and your waiter is serving your steak.
You're on your third Sombrero and
one of the engineers is telling a joke.

I'm home with the TV news on so everythin
will seem normal. I've invited Marcie over for a beer.
It already seems odd to have done it.

Now you're cutting the steak. It is thick and rare
and the boss is paying for it. You laugh.
This is the life! You're glad you smoked that joint.
You see two lovers in the corner
and try not to miss me and spoil it.

I drink Lites with Marcie; we talk about teaching.
She says how nice I'm still with my lover.
She goes home and I spread the newspaper out
on your side of the bed and drink cold tea.

You're going into the lounge for a brandy
with the detail man. The guys make jokes
about the location of your room.
I lay two pillows alongside me in bed.

:: Jane Barnes, Extremes (Blue Giant Press, 1981)

Exhaustion

2010-10-25T12:45:00.002-04:00

if she could use
her hands to fasten
a button twist a knob
scribble a letter
to tell me she dreams
about tailpipes
thirteen parts assembled
again and over
like a broken dance
of two palms
stroking rubbery backs
fingers bowing
to partners swollen
with gnarled collapse
snapping delicate cylinders
joints in place
for the socket and bend of it
as she dismantles her own
one occupation at a time
even before they tell her
with owing fists
to speed the quota
because flesh is thick
in a town that has no fire
just cold furnaces
and breadsinners
with lottery eyes or
bingo on their breath
so where can she go
if the work of her hands
is meant for reaching
the grasp of all things falling

:: Paola Corso, Death by Renaissance (Bottom Dog Press, 2004)

How Things Work

2010-10-18T12:45:00.002-04:00

Today it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
are passed on help others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.

:: Gary Soto, Black Hair (Pittsburgh, 1985)

Work

2010-10-11T12:45:00.007-04:00

The workmen over and above the fence

fit bricks, lift mortar, slap it accurately
in place. Guilty by sitting idle, I
imagine they envy my luxury
of doing nothing until I remember
the days I had my hands full of shovel,
the dragline plowing the ditch of a sewer
through a future subdivision and how
I pitied those who walked by our work
with no apparent occupation,
denied the pleasure of making something,
piece by piece—even if it would soon
be buried—they would depend upon.

:: Robert King, in Rattle 29, summer 2008

The Pig Roast

2010-10-04T12:45:00.002-04:00

The afternoon wound down. The pool was calm.
Some childrem played around the emptied trough.
The small, low town was far enough away
behind the trees to look as though it were
a thread of road, some boxes, a toy steeple
propped upon a branch. The parents bustled in
to cocktails when the lightning bugs began.
The children had the country on their shoes.
Outside, they watched the greasy farmhand set
a tractor's broken axle in the half-light.
They trailed him with a hundred aimless questions
until an aunt corralled them in the house.
A wobbly mother volunteered to fight
the crusted shoes and knotted laces off.
Outside, the farmhand closed his day. He crouched
beside the rifle hanging from the fence
and scratched the pig's broad head, then slowly rose
as though he'd left a teacup balanced there.
After the shot, the farmhand turned to spit,
and, with a rag, wiped from his dirty hands
what must have been the day, being done with it,
and turned then to the night, and night's demands.

:: Joshua Mehigan, The Optimist (Ohio University Press, 2004)

Versus

2010-09-27T12:45:00.000-04:00

What does it matter now, the Friday night
we finally beat Lake Catholic, 6-3?
September something, 1998,
the last-second field goal, and the fray
of students on the field after the game.
We had no chance, the local papers said,
which left us with our middle fingers aimed
at their stands, their sweatered parents, spoiled kids.
What else to do but tear the goal posts down?
What else to do but key the brand new Benz?
What difference then? They went to Yale and Brown,
and my friends stayed in Mentor for their sins.
Still, something to be said for character,
that night's bonfires, those warm, ecstatic beers.

:: Dave Lucas, in Pleiades 26:2, 2006

Midweek Extra: Good Money

2010-09-22T12:45:00.001-04:00

Midweek Extra: Click here to read "Good Money," a story by Michelle Valois.

A Good Radio for Baseball

2010-09-20T12:45:00.002-04:00

Not a poem, but well worth your time to read: Click here to read "A Good Radio for Baseball" by Michelle Valois.

Proof

2010-09-13T12:45:00.002-04:00

Somehow, things turned for the worst.
She didn't get hired at Eastman,
Julliard or Berkeley; so she got a job playing piano
for the voice trainer at a little Bible school
in the Midwest, a dry town where they
manufactured preachers and preachers' wives.
Here she was sure she would die. And early this morning
before they turned on the heat, she went to play
alone in that dour hall, stopping to warm
her fingers in her armpits. (Rumor was,
when a man came in June to tune the piano,
and struck the first notes of Don Giovanni,
bees raged from under the strings
and punished him, punished him.)
Now these drab boys and girls--no, she wouldn't
say men and women--entered the room, and sat
watching her. A bit more time to play the Adagio Cantabile
from Pathetique, before yielding to "Give Me Oil in My Lamp."
A million piano players in the world;
and she, being that one too many,
gone to the mean prairie. Proof, come to
think of it: there must be a god.

:: Steven Huff, Proof (Two Rivers Review, 2004)

Housekeeping Articles

2010-09-06T12:45:00.008-04:00

Living out of the World, the Brothers and Sisters,
By wide-awake industry, made and sold:

Baskets, sieves, brooms, whisks, butter prints,
Curles maple tubs, buckets and coolers,
Butter bowls and trays, rocking-chairs (spring-seat,
Rush bottom, and cane), sheep-skin mats and rugs,
Chair cushions, kitchen tables, step-ladders,
Clothes horses, clothes lines, clothes hampers
And baskets, washboards, wash stands and benches,
Lemon squeezers, wheelbarrows, rolling pins,
Pin boards, barrel covers, knife boxes, cradles,
Herbs, garden seeds, thread spools, carpet hammers,
Sugar hammers, diaper, and rocking horses.

:: Karl Patten, Touch: Poems

Between Men

2010-08-30T12:45:00.004-04:00

We're scheduled for a local, deadheading back.
I check the straight-truck for blankets, rubbers,
reefer dollies, humpstraps and four-wheelers
while Bob checks the gas and oil. The load-on
is an hour away. This means breakfast first.

I order cheesecake. I ask for a hefty portion
but Dottie brings me a measly sliver. "Serves
you right," says Bob over his burnt bacon.
Bob, who's already pinched Dottie, asked her
to sit on his lap, and is sure not to leave a tip.

On the way to the shipper's, I sleep in the cab
to escape Bob's prison re-runs. He wakes me
when we get to Ojai. The job turns out to be
a three room, not a two. Lots of boxes, base
and stick. Another lowball. But Bob's in love.

The shipper's a beauty. Bob confides his lust
as we secure the first tier. Your typical square,
solid start: triple dresser, end tables, a fridge,
books and dishpacks. "She's so hot!" he cries.
Bob hasn't noticed her wrists, feet or ankles,

let alone her neck. I break it to him easy.
He eyeballs her again like he eyes a house
to guess the size truck it'll take. He returns,
a box in each arm. "Fuckin' A. Fuckin' A."
Doesn't say another word until the last tier

is tied off. "Would you ever have it done?"
is the best he comes up with. "No way," I say.
To which he has the balls to ask for first crack
if I change my mind. Says I'd be real pretty.
Which is sweet, but not sweet enough.

:: Ron Drummond, Why I Kick at Night (Portlandia, 2004)

[originally published in The Journal]

Work Song

2010-08-23T12:45:00.002-04:00

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving--
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.

That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. Forlunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the cornered curtain of a shop.

The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.

That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he's done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.

:: Joshua Mehigan, in Poetry (July/August 2008)

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

2010-08-16T12:45:00.002-04:00

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

:: William Butler Yeats

Cleaning the Outhouse

2010-08-09T12:45:00.000-04:00

Click here to read Paul's poem in Ploughshares.

What Work Is

2010-08-02T12:45:00.002-04:00

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know
what work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting fromone foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
aman is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who'snot beside you or behind you or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

:: Philip Levine, What Work Is (Knopf, 1991)

Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work (1934-1935)

2010-07-26T12:45:00.001-04:00

A glass of red wine trembles on the table,
Untouched, and lamplight falls across her shoulders.

She looks down at the cabbage on her plate,
She stares at the broken bread. Proposition:

The irreducible slavery of workers. "To work
In order to eat, to eat in order to work."

She thinks of the punchclock in her chest,
Of night deepening in the bindweed and crabgrass,

In the vapors and atoms, in the factory
Where a steel vise presses against her temples

Ten hours per day. She doesn't eat.
She doesn't sleep. Shealmost doesn't think

Now that she has brushed against the bruised
Arm of oblivion and tasted the blood, now

That the furnace has labelled her skin
And branded her forehead like a Roman slave's.

Surely God comes to the clumsy and inefficient,
To welders in dark spectacles, and unskilled

Workers who spend their allotment of days
Pulling red-hot metal bobbinsfrom the flames.

Surely God appears to the shattered and anonymous,
To the humiliated and afflicted

Whose legs are married to perpetual motion
And whose hands are too small for their bodies.

Proposition: "Through work man turns himself
Into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist.

Work is like a death. We have to pass
Through death. We have to be killed."

We have to wake in order to work, to labor
And count, to fail repeatedly, to submit

To the furious rhythm of machines, to suffer
The pandemonium and inhabit the repetitions,

To become the sacrificial beast: time entering
Into the body, the body entering into time.

She presses her forehead against the table:
To work in order to eat, to eat . . .

Outside, the moths are flaring into stars
And stars are strung like beads across the heavens.

Inside, a glass of red wine trembles
Next to the cold cabbage and broken bread.

Exhausted night, she is the brimming liquid
And untouched food. Come down to her.

:: Edward Hirsch, Earthly Measures (Knopf, 1994)

Sonnet for Her Labor

2010-07-19T12:45:00.002-04:00

My Aunt Nita's kitchen was immaculate and dark,
and she was always bending to the sink
below the window where the shadows off the bulk
of Laurel Mountain rose up to the brink
of all the sky she saw from there. She clattered
pots on countertops wiped clean of coal dust,
fixed three meals a day, fried meat, mixed batter
for buckwheat cakes, hauled water, in what seemed lust
for labor. One March evening, after cleaning,
she lay down to rest and died. I can see Uncle Ed,
his fingers twined at his plate for the blessing;
my Uncle Craig leaning back, silent in red
galluses. No on esaid a word to her. All that food
and cleanliness. No one ever told her it was good.

:: Maggie Anderson, A Space Filled with Moving

Rush Hour

2010-07-12T12:45:00.002-04:00

All day, the important things
leave. Behind the skyline,
the sun is a fast star.
Light seeps
into the city. The street lunges
on its silver belly, turns
back, gives up.
Up steel grids, the city's
last hot breath
pushes itself everywhere
like a stain. They start
to come out, the black suits, men
who can't wait
to loosen their ties. They brandish
briefcases like tense dreams that
just repeat and repeat. Women
exit buildings alone, their hands
shading their eyes, their hands cupped
like hats. Everyone is necessary.
At five o'clock, everyone
wants bourbon, or sleep. Sales
girls lilt past
with a smell of old gardenias, stiletto
heels clicking their song
like castanets. Nylon against flesh,
the swish of skirts. On streetcorners,
newspapers hide faces. Headlines
turn the world
into one small idea. The old drunk
propped on the corner
is asleep with a smile
on his face that could save
this city. Workers pass
him, think "misplaced brick."

:: Gillian Conoley, Some Gangster Pain (Carnegie Mellon, 1987)

Boarding a Bus

2010-07-05T12:45:00.002-04:00

In a small-knit Iowa town I watched
a couple board the bus and take the seat
behind me. They'd waited till then to count
their cash. I could hear each of them whisper
fives and ones like vespers, and repeat, then declare
they couldn't afford to go. "But," she added,
"we haven't had a vacation in--" "That's
very true," he said. And they sighed into the rolling scene:
the sunset on a sea of corn,
a lonely red gas station, an old man changing a flat.
I don't want to scare anyone, but
this is your life too. Tell me how it's any different.

:: Steven Huff, Proof (Two Rivers Review, 2004)

Father and Son at the Mesilla Valley Drive-thru Bank

2010-06-28T12:45:00.000-04:00

Click here to read Carrie Fountain's poem in AGNI Online.

The Noodle Maker's Shop

2010-06-21T12:45:00.000-04:00

click here to read Karina Borowicz's poem at AGNI Online.

Soot

2010-06-14T12:45:00.000-04:00

Down deep they dug, the men
of my family. Shovels & picks,
backs bent. Night on their grave
faces. Monday blues black
every bituminous day of the week.
Sex and scriptures, colliery talk.
Grubs, Smuts--Soot
of the earth. Uncles, cousins,
stripped, mined, blasted.
Saturday, jukebox, Schlitz.
Sunday, penance, blessed. Paychecks
already spent. Into the shaft,
lung by lung, down
a song sung went.

:: Jeff Walt, Soot

Incantations Over Alloys

2010-06-07T12:45:00.000-04:00

for the carburetor gladiator

O spirit of alloys, valves and kin
I sacrifice to you my knuckle skin.
O floating butterfly choke and rotor
get the juice to the damn motor.
O spirit of alloys, valves and kin
I sacrifice to you my knuckle skin.
Spark, fire and suck up fuel,
grant me luck and work now, tool.
O spirit of alloys, valves and kin
I sacrifice to you my knuckle skin.
Choke it out easy, bleed out the glitch,
work now, tool, you son of a bitch!

:: Kaz Sussman, in qaartsiluni

Truck Song, You and I

2010-05-31T12:45:00.002-04:00

The radio is hobbled in this mottled blue truck with its touches of cancerous rust,

the antenna a broken stub,

but the truck sings a 200,000 mile tune. Between muffler sputters and engine knocks,

who needs Elvis or Sheryl Crow?

The tires' rhythmic thrumming, the periodic squeak, keep us humming into the night.

Lying in bed at the hilltop,

we wonder who waits for the stars to burn out? The fuel gauge shows empty,

it always does,

and the odometer is unreliable. On the way home you start to worry

about how much farther we can go.

:: Gregory Stapp, in qaartsiluni

Teachers

2010-05-24T12:45:00.005-04:00

Mrs. Howison from the Highlands;
her heaven chime with Devon,
mine with midden.

Mrs. McCanna, no stranger to a fish supper,
skin clammy with salt'n'vinegar,
declared me out-of-order.

Mr. Beckham replaced his stroboscope
with a boy, propped on a box,
set to shout "flash" every five seonds.

Mrs. Cash balanced breasts and maths
on my shoulder until I keeled over
on first contact with her mouthwash.

These were my teachers
and I have spent my life unlearning
every lesson they taught me.

Today, in a grocery store, a stone's throw
from Turin's multi-ethnic centre,
a child barged into me at the fish-counter.

Scusa, I said, with enough sarcasm
to poison an ocean.
He didn't even look at me.

Foreigner of shit! he replied
in BBC vowels, and I wondered
who had taught him that one.

:: Rob A. Mackenzie, in qaartsiluni

Old Professions

2010-05-17T12:45:00.004-04:00

POET: I told them to look for the right words in the bluest place. Some turned to the sky. Some observed an odd bruise on an old one. My star students closed their eyes. I knew even if they did not find words, they found sparkling black.

CARPENTER: There were no new nails. We burned dwn houses and sifted ashes to reclaim old nails. But the houses had been fixed with wooden pegs. So I told the boys to make nails of forks and spoons and wedding rings.

CLOCKSMITH: One was two and two was three. What's the difference? One hour was no better or worse than another. Only the shadow of a dying tree remained loyal to time. The girls were most stubborn. How do you make twenty-five out of twenty-four? They pouted.

COBBLER: If you run out of cowhide, there's always pigskin. Or the hides from dogs or goats or sheep. If it came down to it, you could peel your skin off your own thighs for shoes, but I wouldn't recommend it.

SINGER: It was easy to teach them to sing. It was less easy to teach them to sing with joy. How could I teach them something I didn't know? My melodies were suspected. We sang songs of frogs, of cranes, of bats.

COBBLER: The fact was, we didn't have anywhere to walk to anyway.

CLOCKSMITH: And since we didn't know what day it was, why track the hours?

CARPENTER: Our team built seventeen houses but there was nobody to live in even one of them.

POET: We gnawed on the words we did not forget. The words became smaller but never lost their flavour.

:: Tammy Ho Lai-ming & Reid Mitchell, in qaartsiluni

It Was My First Nursing Job

2010-05-10T12:45:00.000-04:00

and I was stupid in it. I thought a doctor would not be unkind.
One wouldn't wait for a laboring woman to dilate to ten cm.

He'd brace one hand up his patient's vagina,
clamp the other on her pregnant belly, and force the fetus

through an eight-centimeter cervix.
She tore, of course. Bled.

Stellate lacerations extend from the cervix
like an asterisk. The staff nurses stormed and hissed

but the head nurse shrugged, He doesn't like to wait around.
No other doctor witnessed what he did. The man was an elder

in his church. He chattered and smiled broadly as he worked.
He wore the biggest gloves we could stock.

It was my first real job and I was scared in it.
One night a patient of his was admitted

bleeding. The charge nurse said, He won't rip her.
You take this one.

So I took her.
She quickly delivered a dead baby boy.

Not long dead--you could tell by the skin, intact.
But long enough.

When I wrapped him in a blanket, the doctor flipped open the cover
to let the mother view the body, according to custom.

The baby lay beside her.
He lay stretched out and still.

What a pity, the doctor said.
He seized the baby's penis between his own forefinger and thumb.

It was the first time I had ever seen a male not circumcised
and I was taken aback by the beauty of it.

Look, said the doctor. A little boy. Just what we wanted.
His hand, huge on the child,held the penis as if he'd found

a lovecharm hidden in his grandmother's linen.
And then he dropped it.

The mother didn't make a sound.
When the doctor left, she said to me in a flat voice

I called and told him I was bleeding bad.
He told me not to worry.

I don't remember what I said. Just that
when I escorted her husband from the lobby

the doctor had already gone home. The new father followed me
with a joyful strut. I thought Sweet Jesus Christ

--Did the doctor speak to you?
--No ma'am, the father said.

I said quick-as-I-could-so-I-wouldn't-have-to-think--
The baby didn't make it.

The man doubled over. I told him all wrong.
I would do it all over again.

Say--
Please, sir. Sit down. I'm so very sorry to tell you--

No. It's been sixteen years.
I would say, I am your witness.

No. I have never told the whole truth.
Forgive me.

It was my first job
and I was lost in it.

:: Belle Waring, Dark Blonde (Sarabande, 1997)

Green and Red, Verde y Rojo

2010-04-26T12:45:00.000-04:00

for Jacobo Mena

At night, when Beacon Hill
is a private army
of antique gas lamps
glowing in single file,
Jacobo vacuum-cleans
the law office of Adams and Blinn,
established 1856, with the founder's
wire-rimmed Protestant face
still supervising the labor,
a restored photograph in the window.

Jacobo's face
is indio-guatemalteco,
bored as the work,
round as worry,
heavy as waiting.
Guatemala is green and red,
green volcanoes, red birds,
green like rivers in rain,
red like coffee beans at harvest,
the river-green and quetzal bird-red
of his paintings,
perfiles del silencio.

Testimony of death-squad threats
by telephone, shrilled in the dark,
the flash of fear's adrenaline,
and family stolen with the military's greed
for bodies, all recorded by stenographers,
then dismissed:
Guatemala leaves no proof,
and immigration judges are suspicious
only of the witnesses, who stagger and crawl
through America. Asylum denied,
appeal pending.

As he waits, Jacobo paints
in green and red, verde y rojo,
and at night he cleans the office
of Adams and Blinn,
where Guatemala cannot be felt
by the arrogrant handshake of lawyers,
where there is no green or red,
only his shadow blending
with the other shadows in the room,
and all the hours of the night
to picture the executioners.

:: Martin Espada, Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction

Swing Low

2010-04-19T12:45:00.000-04:00

My sister, wearing a white turban,
sang Swing Low
as we picked up sticks
in early August
in a field my father wanted to plow
for the planting of soy
that would attract quail,
which he would shoot.

My sister and I imagined
trying to eat dead birds
at our father’s table, watching
for the crunch of shot
between our teeth.

We could never stomach
murdered food, food
that had been trapped
on a hot day, like us.
So my sister sang slave songs
even though we knew
it was wrong.

We are not black in my family.
My father is the whitest
among us.

:: Faulkner Fox, in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review #7 (1995)

Cry Room, St. Mark's Church

2010-04-12T12:45:00.001-04:00

In the back behind smudged glass we sat
with three other mothers and their kids.
No one was in fact crying. Or reciting
prayers. We could have been looking in

the window of the A & P or K-Mart. I was old
enough not to consider crying an option.
My little sister crawled beneath the kneeler
and fell asleep. I crouched awkward in the pew.

To be caught in the cry room—I wouldn’t hear
the end of it. Everyone stared down the usher
when he came in to shake his collection basket

under our noses. 1963. I’d made my first
communion and begun saving my best lies
for the confessional booth. A room for sins.
A room to cry in. I watched my mother’s head

loll back, snap forward. Why were we there?
Was someone going to bring us yet another
baby to take home? One woman entered late
and sat in the last of the four pews, wedging

herself into the corner to sob uncontrollably.
Other mothers stared out the window
at the muffled mass as if waiting for the good parts.
Mine sighed and yanked us up and out

of there. We walked home in a fluster of spring wind.
I was hungry for a doughnut or two. Glazed,
sticky in the flimsy cardboard box with the see-through
plastic window. Did we stay long enough for it to count?
I asked. My mother carried my sister in one arm

and puffed on a cigarette with the fervor
of the newly-converted. We passed the Powder
Puff hair salon and the boarded up Dairy Queen
and the ill-fated slot-car track and the ditch

they found Larry Jarman in. I didn’t cry then
and I’m not crying now. God—you had to love
the dude. God, not Larry. It might’ve been Larry’s
mother crying in the back. Or Mary Magdalene’s

distant niece. Or the victim of another immaculate
conception. All I know is that I bugged my mother
into a frenzy till she bought the doughnuts
at Oaza bakery near the drive-thru car wash

and threw the box at me and told me to shut up.
My older brothers had lied about going to early
mass. I don’t know where they went, but they wouldn’t
take me with them. My mother believed in miracles

and my sleeping father believed in the almighty dollar
and the nearly almighty cents. I at e two doughnuts
before we got home. The sweet glaze stuck to my lips
and face. I confess to a smile and a taunting boogaloo

on the sidewalk as my brothers raced out the door
to snatch the box. My mother dropped my sister
onto the stoop, then fell to the dead brown grass
and smiled her own wistful boogaloo. You had to love him

or hate him or pretend or believe he didn’t exist. The cry
room stunk with soiled diapers and sweat. The hymnals
had pages ripped out, drooled and doodled on. The truth
was elusive. Why would he want criers in a separate room?

What about a room for laughers? No one laughed
in church. Even when the priest—any priest—tried out
a joke. Are there any good jokes that don’t have a cruelty
to them? Cigarettes weren’t as good as I imagined.

We haunted ourselves in the reflection of the cry room glass.
My tiny grandmother in her tiny room watched “Mass
for Shut-ins” on her tiny TV. She might have been crying,
depending on the pain. She was my second death after Larry.

Nobody explained about Larry till I was old enough
to understand. The church stretched yellow police tape
around our lives like those in fancy stores where you couldn’t
touch a thing. Usually, some kid started bawling, but not that day.

Oh, the sweetness of the glaze,
and how the greed made my mother smile.

:: Jim Daniels, in Green Mountains Review (18:2, 2005)

Emma Waits Out a Spring Snow

2010-04-05T12:45:00.000-04:00

We sure had some snow.
So many wrecks, all over
the road, down ditches
and spun out in fields
like cars which had gotten
loose without their drivers.

Didn’t go out ourselves,
only for the mail or to feed
the horses, and Will does that.
All I do is crochet and cook.
Will goes out to feed the cats,
two nice black females. One
meets him right at the door.

Before the snow Will had onions
and lettuce up, and some peas.
Also have tomato plants but
we kept them indoors. Now
the Easter flowers are coming
through. I wonder why I quit
going to church. Been all
of forty years now. Everything

might be froze—it’s all snowed
over. My mother would say that
early planting was like trying
to get ahead of God.

:: Naton Leslie, Emma Saves Her Life (2007)

Death of an Iowa Farmer

2010-03-29T12:45:00.001-04:00

click here to read Elaine Sexton's poem in Bloom.

Three by Ai

2010-03-22T12:45:00.000-04:00

THE TENANT FARMER

Hailstones puncture the ground,
as I sit at the table, rubbing a fork.
My woman slides a knife across her lips,
then lays it beside a cup of water.
Each day she bites another notch in her thumb
and I pretend relief is coming
as the smooth black tire, Earth,
wheels around the sun without its patch of topsoil
and my mouth speaks: wheat, barley, red cabbage,
roll on home to Jesus,
it's too late now you're dead.

===

STARVATION

Rain, tobacco juice, spit from the sky
shatters against your body,
as you push the pane of glass through the mud.
The white oak frame of the house shakes
when I slam the door and stand on the porch,
fanning myself with a piece of cardboard
cut in the shape of a ham.

There's a pot of air on the stove.
You drove seventy miles, paid for that glass
and I can't remember the last good meal I had,
but bring it up here. I'll help you. I'm not angry.
We'll paint the sun on it from the inside,
so if we die some night, a light will still be on.
It's hell to starve in the dark.
I don't know why. I'm just your woman,
like you, crazy to lose all I've got.
It's rotten, you know, rotten.
The table's set. What time is it?
Wash your hands first. You're late.

===

THE CORPSE HAULER'S ELEGY

Beside the river, I stop the wagon
loaded with the plague dead
and have a drink.
I fill my mouth to swallow slowly,
then climb back into my seat.
The old horse drops one turd, another.
Corpses, I give you these flowers.

:: Ai, Cruelty (1973)

Visiting My Father in Florida

2010-03-15T12:45:00.000-04:00

Forty years, every working day he drove
through the roiling haze of Cleveland streets
to the Harshaw Chemical Co., past Union Carbide,
Rockwell International, Bethlehem Steel, all the
barbed-wire, bricked-window plants, sulfur
rising from their stacks to rain on playgrounds
and reservoirs, the states downwind. He knew

the neighborhoods of Italians and Poles, Greeks
and Slovenes, Slovaks and Croats before they moved
their kitchen tables, photo albums and ceramic jockeys
to the suburbs. He couldn't understand the girls
in platform heels and slit skirts who'd whisper
"Hey Mister" from bleak doorways. "Go home to
your mother," he told one. "Your white ass,"

she answered. He persisted so long even he changed.
Now we drive through his new "planned community,"
banks and K Marts garish as modern churches,
acres of offices of oncologists, proctologists,
urologists, ancient women pedaling tricycles,
Lincoln and Cadillac dealers, the old in bunches
raising blouses and shirts to show their latest scars.

Later we fish his new canal. Caloosahatchee mullet
leap stiffly toward the sky. He lifts his rod
and a whiskered, flat-headed catfish the color
of sludge lands between us, writhing. I've never
seen a thing so old, so ugly. It leaves a trail
of slime on the new dock, lost in so much sudden light,
blind. Its mouth gapes the precious, useless air.

:: David Citino, in Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life

Spring Plowing

2010-03-01T12:45:00.001-05:00

God knows it’s slow work, especially
when March streams like a broken faucet,
or gluttonous snows fall through February.

You batter the gates till you can’t stand it,
then you try . . . Next thing you know,
you’re axle deep in a dead furrow

or your rig sinks like a big green boat
above some broken drain tile. You can bury
yourself in any square foot that lies low.

But you can only gnaw the stall door so long.
My dead father would curse the weather
for days or weeks at a time, hovering

inside the kitchen like a dark gray cloud,
having changed the oil in every engine
and greased each conceivable part,

waiting, waiting, good God, for better weather.
And that, gentle reader, is why I left
the goddamn farm.

But there were other days, magazine-cover,
tractor-ad days, when the ground turned itself
over, the way a woman unpeels her robe,

anxious to be loved. The very wind
smelled of apple flowers and diesel smoke,
and you believed you were born for a reason.

:: William Jolliff, in West Branch #60 (2007)

Any and All

2010-02-15T12:45:00.000-05:00

You draw nearer to see her more closely
the blind woman by the bronze doors

of the old Merchants Bank, her mouth
wide open as if in a silent roar,

several dollars stuffed in the pockets
of her mink coat. She is easy to forget

a few days later when you think of her
—not long. The phone is ringing.

You put Byrdman on hold. Polen
wants you in his office immediately.

The lawyers from Mars and the bankers
from Switzerland have arrived to close the deal,

the money in their heads articulated
to the debt of the state of Bolivia.

How much later the Croatian woman
who empties the wastebaskets laughs

when you answer you’ve been better
and you’ve been worse. How much sooner

you’re told not to tell anyone Byrdman’s
grandfather was a Jew. How much No. 54

Wall Street, emblematic reality of extreme
speculations and final effects.

The other evening at a party in the West Sixties
you say as much. None of them knows

what any of it is worth, you say to yourself
later, spitting into an unexpected breeze.

Yellow moons of street lamps on Ninth Avenue
obscured by atmospheric soot and fog,

in the Twenties empty windows of butcher shops,
factories and warehouses without names,

no taxis, the green light behind the window
of a corner bar. A young man sporting muscles,

a woman he might own on his arm, clearly
doesn’t like the way you look or look at him,

lets his leash out enough for his wolfdog
to just nip your leg. Another day

you contemplate your strategy:
think about how they think about you

thinking about them and the look on your face
to prove you have the proper attitude.

Let no laughter reveal moods. Let
Charlotte Stone reveal that her father

over the weekend purchased a peninsula in Rhode Island
for Harry and her, let her teeth

be too large and too gray: there is blood
and there is blood-letting; this is not your blood.

Shut the door and wait. Someone else’s father
forgives you when you know not what you do,

reminds you, “He’s a weasel but he’s my friend.”
You’re a monkey and you work for him,

decide for him whether his clauses should be restrictive,
whether to replace every “any” with “all.”

:: Lawrence Joseph, Curriculum Vitae (Pittsburgh, 1988)

The Dead Guy and the Evangelist

2010-01-25T12:45:00.001-05:00

A guy wearing a tie and a soaking shirt
was handing out religious pamphlets
today at the truckstop, asking everybody
have they been saved from eternal damnation by Christ
our personal lord and savior. I’d just picked up
four deads that were three days gone
from the heat down at Shafer Brothers Feedlot.
My mind was on air conditioning and fueling up
so I could get my load back to the plant.
He came over, wearing enough cologne
to keep a dog away from a dead wagon,
and asked me if I knew where I’m going
when I die. A rancher who called me once
to carry off a palomino asked
how I liked the resurrection business,
and so I told that preacher I wasn’t sure,
but I work in resurrection too,
and had to get a load to Wauneta before it spoiled.

Who is he to ask me where I’m going
when I die? Me and that preacher and a millionaire
will end up drained and pickled and dressed
in suits, and that’s all any of us knows.
What’s left is just a carcass the undertaker
powders and buries instead of hauling off
to the rendering plant. We both keep
the dead from piling up. People would know
if somebody wasn’t there to keep those cows
from laying around getting ripe when they died.

I don’t need to imagine more of a heaven
than the light inside of Five Springs Canyon
afternoons when cutthroats pop the surface
and bite on anything you throw in the water,
or watching pheasants break from a field of cornstalks,
or even having Rhonda call me Darlin’
when I stop for lunch at the Conestoga Grill.
I won’t say I’m ready. But if I got run over
by a sugar beet truck tonight, I could die knowing
I did some good in life, that I was willing
to do a job not many people would do.

:: William Notter, Holding Everything Down (2009)

Midnight Ramble

2010-01-18T12:45:00.003-05:00

This is the middle class, lower. The tree in the yard.

Bushes in front of the house. Flowers in the yard. Lawn

mowers growling. Dogs barking. Lots of dogs. Every-

body has one, for safety, and they keep them locked up

in their yards where they bark and bark behind their

fences because no one ever takes them for a walk. Ice

cream men. Lawn chairs. And beer and beer bellies and

white paint on trim and brick and a hose at the side of

the house. Squares, everything squares. Sidewalks and

lawns and porches and houses and brains. TV sets. Gar-

age sales and telephone poles. Kids sell kool-aid in sum-

mer, shovel snow in winter. Till they’re old enough to

smoke and drink and raise hell. They get a couple years

of that, then it’s factory time. Always one lawn mower

going. Because everyone on this street works in a fac-

tory and they’re all on different shifts. Maybe they

communicate through their lawns, waking me here in

the dark, damp basement. The young guys in the fac-

tory say they’re not going to work there the rest of

their lives. Just ‘temporary.’ The old guys laugh at that.

They say Temporary my ass.

:: Jim Daniels, Punching Out