My red pickup choked on burnt oil
as I drove down Highway 99.
In wind-tattered garbage bags
I had packed my whole life:
two pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts,
an a pair of work boots.
My truck needed work, and through
the blue smoke rising from under the hood,
I saw almond orchards, plums,
and raisins spread out on paper trays,
and acres of Mendota cotton my mother picked as a child.
My mother crawled through the furrows
and plucked cotton balls that filled
the burlap sack she dragged,
shoulder-slung, through dried-up bolls,
husks, weevils, dirt clods,
and dust that filled the air with thirst.
But when she grew tired,
she slept on her mother’s burlap,
stuffed thick as a mattress,
and Grandma dragged her over the land
where time was told by the setting sun. . . .
History cried out to me from the earth,
in the scream of starling flight,
and pounded at the hulls of seeds to be set free.
History licked the asphalt with rubber,
sighed in the windows of abandoned barns,
slumped in the wind-blasted palms,
groaned in the heat, and whispered its soft curses.
I wanted my own history—not the earth’s,
nor the history of blood, nor of memory,
and not the job founded for me at Galdini Sausage.
I sought my own—a new bruise to throb hard
as the asphalt that pounded the chassis of my truck.
:: David Dominguez, Work Done Right (Arizona, 2003)
10.08.2012
10.01.2012
Garbage Truck
After it lifts the army-green, stuffed
dumpster over its head and the trash
falls to the receptacle, it hulks
backward with a cadenced beep as if
to say, get out the fucking way, please.
:: Paul Martinez Pompa, My Kill Adore Him (Notre Dame, 2009)
dumpster over its head and the trash
falls to the receptacle, it hulks
backward with a cadenced beep as if
to say, get out the fucking way, please.
:: Paul Martinez Pompa, My Kill Adore Him (Notre Dame, 2009)
9.17.2012
Opinion
Half-way to work and Merriman already has told me
What he thinks about the balanced budget, the Mets'
Lack of starting pitching, the dangers of displaced
Soviet nuclear engineers, soy products, and diesel cars.
I look out the window and hope I'll see a swan.
I hear they're nasty but I love their necks
And how they glide along so regally.
I never take the time to go to a pond
And spend an hour watching swans. What
Would happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty?
When I look over at Merriman, he's telling Driscoll
That the President doesn't know what he's doing
With China. "China," I say out loud but softly.
I go back to the window. It's started snowing.
:: Baron Wormser, in Green Mountains Review (2002)
What he thinks about the balanced budget, the Mets'
Lack of starting pitching, the dangers of displaced
Soviet nuclear engineers, soy products, and diesel cars.
I look out the window and hope I'll see a swan.
I hear they're nasty but I love their necks
And how they glide along so regally.
I never take the time to go to a pond
And spend an hour watching swans. What
Would happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty?
When I look over at Merriman, he's telling Driscoll
That the President doesn't know what he's doing
With China. "China," I say out loud but softly.
I go back to the window. It's started snowing.
:: Baron Wormser, in Green Mountains Review (2002)
9.10.2012
Anatomy of Melancholy
Lucy Doolin, first day on the job, stroked his goatee
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor
and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also
that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,
born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,
along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,
we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.
As we should also always remember to call him
only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,
and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,
least of all with the title “Mister” attached,
which would remind him of that same most hated father
and plunge him therefore into a mood
he could not promise he would, he said, “behave
appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,
unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,
was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.
Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,
this meant not only beer cans and bottles,
all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also
the occasional condom too, as well as the festering
roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry,
or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar
with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed
into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves
rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments
then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.
Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded
our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,
sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,
in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer
we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch
of wall we could see through the open door
was plastered with fold-outs and pages
from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine
he had ever found among the wreckage there.
Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.
Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,
by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards
of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,
while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22
from the rack beside his door and popped
with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,
then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,
and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack
to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide
coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.
As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom
and Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dash
all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,
a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,
this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,
it might have had to do with something like the gallery
Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title
meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.
There were things about men we might be
unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.
And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,
fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade
with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.
The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness
of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,
and rats were more common than hares
and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,
as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—
the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance
of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,
the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,
whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox,
seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire.
Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam,
one, after medical school, would hang himself
from a beam in his parents’ basement, the others
merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory.
Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump
would spend his last twenty years in prison,
having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug
through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away,
balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer,
arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump,
whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself
even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some
court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself,
was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country
of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers,
in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense,
that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.
:: Robert Wrigley, in Poetry, September 2011
and informed the seven of us in his charge
his name was short for Lucifer, and that his father, a man
he never knew, had been possessed,
as his mother had told him, of both an odd sense of humor
and a deep and immitigable bitterness. Also
that the same man had named Lucy’s twin brother,
born dead, Jesus Christ. These facts, he said,
along with his tattoos and Mohawked black hair,
we should, in our toils on his behalf, remember.
As we should also always remember to call him
only by that otherwise most womanly diminutive,
and never, he warned, by his given nor surname,
least of all with the title “Mister” attached,
which would remind him of that same most hated father
and plunge him therefore into a mood
he could not promise he would, he said, “behave
appropriately within.” Fortunately, our job,
unlike the social difficulties attached thereto,
was simple: collect the trash from the county’s back roads.
Although, given Lucy’s insistence on thoroughness,
this meant not only beer cans and bottles,
all manner of cast-off paper and plastics, but also
the occasional condom too, as well as the festering
roadkill fresh and ridden with maggotry,
or desiccate and liftable only from the hot summer tar
with a square-bladed shovel, all of which was to be tossed
into the bed of the township flatbed truck we ourselves
rode to and from the job in. By fifty-yard increments
then we traveled. He was never not smoking a cigarette.
Late every afternoon, at the dump, while we unloaded
our tonnage of trash, he sat with Stump McCarriston,
sexton of the dump and the dump’s constant resident,
in the shade, next to a green, decrepit trailer
we marveled at and strangely envied, since every inch
of wall we could see through the open door
was plastered with fold-outs and pages
from every Stump-salvaged Playboy and nudie magazine
he had ever found among the wreckage there.
Stump, we understood, was the ugliest man on earth.
Even had Lucy not told us so, we would have known,
by the olfactory rudeness within twenty yards
of his hovel, that he never bathed. And once,
while we shoveled and scraped, he took up the .22
from the rack beside his door and popped
with amazing accuracy three rats not fifty feet from us,
then walked to their carcasses, skinned them out,
and hung their hides on a scavenged grocery store rack
to dry. He was making, Lucy explained, a rat hide
coat we could see, come the fall, except for school.
As for school, it was a concept Stump could not fathom
and Lucy had no use for, on the truck’s dash
all that summer Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,
a tome he said he’d read already eleven times,
this summer being the twelfth. We thought, in some way,
it might have had to do with something like the gallery
Stump’s trailer contained, the first word of its title
meaning something to us, the last nothing at all.
There were things about men we might be
unable ever to know, which we somehow knew was lucky.
And Lucky, incidentally, was the name of the cat,
fat and mangy, that, once Stump was back in the shade
with Lucy, began, one by one, to consume the hideless rats.
The town we came from was sinking into the emptiness
of a thousand abandoned coal mine shafts beneath it,
and rats were more common than hares
and universally despised. They shamed us, it seemed,
as we were shamed by ignorance and curiosity—
the bodies of those women on the walls, the provenance
of rats the very earth offered up like a plague,
the burden of a name like Lucifer or Stump,
whose name, as it was scrawled on his mailbox,
seemed to be Stumplin Reilly McCarriston, Esquire.
Of the seven of us, one would die in Vietnam,
one, after medical school, would hang himself
from a beam in his parents’ basement, the others
merely gone, vanished in actuality if not in memory.
Leaving me, alone, to tell this story. How Stump
would spend his last twenty years in prison,
having shot Lucy—one slender, flattening .22 slug
through the forehead—as he stood fifty feet away,
balanced atop the tub of an ancient wringer washer,
arms extended, like Jesus Christ, said Stump,
whose trailer was bulldozed into the dump itself
even before the trial, and who, no doubt, by some
court-appointed lawyer if not the appalled sheriff himself,
was forced to bathe and shave, to step into the unknown country
of a scentless white shirt and black businessman’s trousers,
in order to offer his only yet most sincere defense,
that Lucifer—Mr. Doolin, as the court insisted—had told him to.
:: Robert Wrigley, in Poetry, September 2011
9.03.2012
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
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
8.20.2012
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
8.13.2012
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)
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)
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