Work

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

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

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

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

A Good Radio for Baseball

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

Proof

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

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