Through a Glass, Darkly

Most nights my father keeps the gas station
open late, downstairs in the service bay
the clank of wrenches on concrete, the grind
of casters sends him rolling under cars.
Behind glass, on the second story, I can hear
the engines idle and come back to life,
see the horse on high with wings that light up
Mobilgas in neon's ad nauseam.
Its color thrown against walls reminds me
of blood, of my mother driven from here.
Her volatility matched only by his.
In spite of the rain drifting sideways, I spy him
in uniform standing beside the pumps,
downing beer. He is gauging how long
the storm should last. And when it stops, his opera
will come right through the floor, the wind outside
grow so still even his smoke rings hold their shape.

:: Marcus Cafagna, in Crab Orchard Review

American Zen

is sitting for twelve, or twenty-four, or thirty-six hours

in the cab of an 18-foot Ryder rental truck

until our buttocks begin to rot.

We move and meditate

behind the wheel at the same time.

My friend is leaving Flagstaff for Chicago

where streets and basements flooded

for the second time this summer.

He’s searching for the place

to make his family happy.

Some things I can’t figure out:

how, at 5 a.m.,

desert roadsides in New Mexico look like water

in the distance as sunlight slants off

candy wrappers and crushed beer cans,

or road signs in Oklahoma: for instance,

Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates

and Don’t Drive Into Smoke.

Of two fatigues I can feel,

this morning I feel both.

I mistake the prison for a motel.

There are few rooms anywhere else.

But the foldaway’s springs and foam mattress feel so sweet,

I know why the Villa in El Reno is

The Friendliest Motel in Town.

When we stop to fill up the truck’s tank,

I eat shrink-wrapped beef jerky

and watch the moon rise

out of barbed-wire fences,

remembering Han Shan

who left all his possessions behind,

moved to Cold Mountain

and took its name as his own.

“The poor travel light,” I mutter

to the attendant pumping gas.

He stares me into the need to pee.

Walking around back

to the one working rest room,

I see the license plates on wrecked cars claim

Oklahoma is OK.

An Indian leaning against the urinal turns

and asks me if I want to buy some hubcaps.

For a moment, he looks like Han Shan.

I shake my head, thinking, “Poor bastard,

we’ve all but forgotten you.”

Like any man, he shakes himself dry, zips up

and begins to disappear

in the roadside smoke,

holding his thumb out like a mark of punctuation,

exclamation point or half of a parenthesis,

hoping to hook up

with anyone who’ll take a chance, stop

and offer him a ride.

:: Antonio Vallone, at GistStreet online

Apollo over Texas

It was 1969 and Apollo was on its way to the moon,
but we were down in the Texas panhandle, working the pipeline.
We got up before dawn and drove across the pampas and into the scrub fields
where cactus and briars were kings, drinking coffee
and staring out at the blue light coming up over the silos.
Old men on sagging porches, beginning a long, hot day of doing
nothing with a vengeance, spat tobacco juice into their dirt yards as we passed.
I followed the line through Oklahoma and Texas with my father
that summer, grading roads and cutting fences for the pipe trucks. It
was life near the bottom of the labor chain, where rednecks
worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, drank themselves
into a mumbling stagger every night, and arrived in stupors
the next morning, thick-tongued and guzzling water
until the numbness burned off. They drove shiny red macho trucks
with gun racks in the back window and Confederate flags
crossed on the bumper. At midday when the rocket
was almost there, the radio was out of breath
with the momentum of it all, the pipelines jigged around the sand dunes, cracking
jokes about the moon, about the man in the moon,
about moonings under red lights. That night I slept
with my face on the windowsill just to get some breeze
in a dust-bucket apartment that had no air conditioning
and that I shared with my mother and father.
The next morning my mother woke us a half-hour early, saying
“Y’all get up! That thing is landing!” and we sat around
yawning at a half-broken television with foil-enhanced rabbit ears
and reception saturated with static and snow and hog prices
breaking in from another channel. “Hot-damn! Something, ain’t it?”
my father said as he put on his work boots.
“Yeah, and what will they be doing next?” my mother said
as the astronaut stepped out onto the moon,
and it was the same moon you could see if you looked out the window
and up into the sky above that Texas town.

:: David Tucker, Late for Work (2006)

The Farmer

Each day I go into the fields

to see what is growing
and what remains to be done.
It is always the same thing: nothing
is growing, everything needs to be done.
Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray
till my bones ache and hands rub
blood-raw with honest labor—
all that grows is the slow
intransigent intensity of need.
I have sown my seed on soil
guaranteed by poverty to fail.
But I don’t complain—except
to passersby who ask me why
I work such barren earth.
They would not understand me
if I stooped to lift a rock
and hold it like a child, or laughed,
or told them it is their poverty
I labor to relieve. For them,
I complain. A farmer of dreams
knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams
knows what it means to be patient.
Each day I go into the fields.
 
:: W.D. Ehrhart, Beautiful Wreckage (Adastra 1999)

The Brothers on the Trash Truck and My Near Death Experience

Having just been left for good by you--your tongue
flicking over your lips like a thirsty newt, your cheeks plush with screwery--
having been left so, I walked into the backing-up path of a trash truck.

Its ding-reverse bell must have been defunct.
It was the side-rider's YO! that halted it.
Don't hurt her baby, don't hurt her! the side-rider called in a franticky chant.

The driver leapt out.
MISS, MISS! cried the side-rider, MISS! 
You were nowhere in sight. There I lay in my neighbor's hedge,

outlandishly unhurt. I looked up. The driver had
green eyes, a tall tan black man with those farfetched
feline eyes, like say maybe

one of his foremothers volunteered for a shot at the Nordic gene pool,
or, on the other hand, consider that one etymology of motherfucker 
cites masters raping female slaves, the children forced to watch. . .

but is this my business how the man got green eyes?
I'm glad I had this thought because I don't know what to do with it.
Forgive me, I said. My boyfriend dumped me, I wasn't looking . . .

We were shook--me, driver, side-rider
by the divine simplicity of the Near Miss.
So they took me home. The brothers escorted me back--

two blocks cruising high in the cab
like the Empress of Metropolis.
Don't even worry 'bout it, the driver said.

If he don't come back, go on and catch you a bigger fish.
And the side-rider meanwhile balletically leapt
and landed and kept on leaping,

on and off the rolling truck, heaving those garbage bins
light as confetti, light as burned billet-doux,
the sweet spent tickets to my heart.

:: Belle Waring, in Green Mountains Review 8:2 (1995)

Class Analysis

If I were to write s.th. about Paul
I would write about
regret,
using abbreviations
to stand in for the failures of intention
or what went by too quickly for the human eye to follow.

I’d have to say s.th. about
suppers together
searing peppers over the gas flame
herbs I’d never tasted
and the sign painted along an entire kitchen wall
between the goldfish bowl and the Azalea:
EATS.

I wouldn’t fail to mention
the red wreck of a car
bench seats
and the first ride I took in it
Paul driving
looking small and efficient behind the wheel.

There’d be a part that talked about the long walk
to the cranked-up neighborhood candyman
willing to sell us his last two hits of acid
b/c he thought Paul might still one day give in;
and the 8 hrs on the floor afterward, a world,
holding on holding on and watching
the ceiling turn into cirrus shapes
160 mi. above our sprawled out, blissed out
shit-talking bodies that held on held on held on
like they expected to float down finally and find themselves
together.

How the word “love” was never spoken
or maybe once, at the end of a phone call,
stuttered
accidental
a Freudian slip,
but present ever after in the hidden language;
goodbye meant it
so did wanna do s.th. thursday
so did yes.

I’d write about the butt fur
the chest fur
the sweat-sticky buffalo fur
(the time we did it on a friend’s rug)
clinging to the backs of Paul’s
thin arms;
the blunt-fingered hands at the ends of them
work-rough and cut-up and always one nail hammered black;
the dark spot on the dick head
like a second, more reticent piss slit;
the lazy tongue the drawl the spit-
sweet kisses
the throat cored out special for me to park
my cock in
while Paul sang songs on it
about being

just

like

me.

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

Let Nothing Lie Dormant

At the farmer’s market in Rosarito, Mexico,

a man touched my arm.
He sat on a stool at a wooden table,
and in the center,
a blue pitcher of water beaded under the sun.
Hunkered over his lap,
he worked with a gouge on a block of walnut,
and he blew at the dust,
and the dust swirled in the breeze.

Done stripping the sapwood vulnerable to rot,
the man held the heart of the wood,
a purple wood hard against
the chisel’s cutting edge.
He looked up from his work,
and his gray eyes told me I must listen.
“This wood must be strong
or the heart cracks before the real work is done.
See this?” he asked softly,
and he lifted a mallet carved
from a branch of apple, “Strong wood,” he said.
“It wanted to be more than a tree.”
He rubbed fresh walnut dust between his palms.
We drank glasses of ice water,
talked about life in general,
and he used the pitcher,
billowed and wet like the sail of a boat,
to cool his neck.

Later, through the soft meat of an avocado,
I felt the pit longing to be free.
:: David Dominguez, Work Done Right (Arizona, 2003)