Driving to Work

Six of you cram into Hopko’s Mustang every Tuesday
into Hrishin’s Nova Thursday, into Bevsky’s Duster
Wednesday. Monday you ride a Pontiac
and Friday you drive the Olds, room
for all and lunch pails, three stacked in back
sleeping the hour drive 5:45 for the 7 a.m. shift
sleeping stacked that way the hour drive home at 3,

and every day you go the same route through Chunk
the edge of Dutch country on down the Lehigh River
through the gap until you reach the city on the other side
and see the smoke rise from your stacks, see the orange light
riding up the towers of your stacks, and every day you look behind
at 3:15 to see the smoke a little darker where you have stacked the coals.

:: Bim Angst, in Beloit Poetry Journal (No. 30, Summer 1980)

I Wake with the Taste of What You Tasted: Agnes Smedley, 1892-1950

The night before the operation you said
“I don’t expect to die . . . but in case I do . . .” And then you did.

I was tightly coiled, held safe when you came apart
of a piece in Oxford, 1950.

I want to say we are sisters. Yes.
I want to share a present tense with you. A name.

I want to say we are sisters as temperature and wind, loneliness
among friends. The lines of a poem that do not come.

Learning to survive. Staying or returning
to survive.

Your political predictions went on without you,
your stone letters in the hand of a Chinese peasant general.

Pushing yourself back into memory,
you stared us down by the power of your Colorado earth.

Now I wake with the taste of what you tasted
in my mouth.

Misery when the call comes in to join, mesh,
submerge and reemerge in groups of men. The flowers of defeat.

Need, your circular letters open doors
to those who put them, unopened, on the “maybe” pile.

I wonder about my journals, Agnes,
who will take my salted tongue.

What time is it, please? Will the new encyclopedia
hold the necessary entry?

Deep in pockets I shove my fisted hands,
clenched images. Yan’an or Esteli.

People who did not look darker or smaller to us.
People. Their eyes open.

The lie comes home to sleep. No one forgets.
It happened on the first day of all our dreams.

:: Margaret Randall, in Calling Home: Working Class Women’s Writings (1990)

Family Dollar

Click here to read Joan Murray's poem in the Winter 2007-08 issue of Ploughshares.

Field Trip to the Mill

Sister Monica has her hands full
timing the climb to the catwalk
so the fourth-graders are lined up
before the next heat is tapped, “and no
giggling no jostling, you monkeys!
So close to the edge!” She passes out
sourballs for bribes, not liking
the smile on the foreman’s face,
the way he pulls at his cap,
he’s not Catholic. Protestant madness,
these field trips, this hanging from catwalks
suspended over an open hearth.

Sister Monica understands Hell
to be like this. If overhead cranes clawing
their way through layers of dark air
grew leathery wings and flew screeching
at them, it wouldn’t surprise her.
And the three warning whistle blasts,
the blazing orange heat pouring out
liquid fire like Devil’s soup
doesn’t surprise her. She understands
Industry and Capital and Labor,
the Protestant trinity. That is why
she trembles here, the children clinging
to her as she watches them learn their future.

:: Patricia Dobler, Talking to Strangers (1986)

Wonder

Wonder Bread builds strong bodies twelve ways

We toured the Wonder Bread factory
our blue and yellow scout uniforms jittering down
the drab aisles of hum and clang.

At the end of the line, we were allowed
our taste of Detroit's assembly-line communion.
Our first factory, and not our last.

The workers silent as we passed,
staring over our heads numb
with what they could not share.

In their own uniforms, bare of arrows
and awards, they disappeared into white bread.
When I got on the bus to go home

all I could think about was the smell
of warm bread emerging from giant ovens.
In the stores, the white loaves

covered in balloon-patterned plastic wrappers.
What were the twelve ways?
My friend stroked his cheek with a warm slice,

his eyes closed. Wouldn't it be great
to work here? he said. When we toured the Stroh's
Brewery years later, he said the same thing.

They offered no tours of auto plants
yet that was where we ended up, parking
our first cars in the enormous lined lots

fenced in, protected. Wouldn't it be
great if communion tasted like this?
Tony said. Or maybe I just thought it.

At home, my mother baked bread
on rare occasions, her misshapen
yeasty loaves waiting in the kitchen

after school. It tasted great
while warm, straight from the oven.
But it hardened quickly, the odd

shapes not practical for sandwiches,
and she made at least a dozen every night
for school and work lunches,

an assembly line of peanut butter
and jelly, bologna and mustard,
brown paper bags initialed

for morning sendoffs. That bakery
is now the Motor City Casino,
and that's what started this--

imagining slots and chips
where bread was once made.
The brewery's gone too, by the way,

by the way, by the way, way side.
We all take communion
in our own twisted way, and we all

pay the price. When it rains, it only
sometimes pours. A money factory, what
could be purer and sicker?

I'm driving my car past that grand old factory,
a building saved by greed,
a rare Detroit victory against rubble.

Twelve ways. I hold up my three fingers
to recite the old scout oath. I make the sign
of the cross and recite the two prayers

I remember. What I remember is
you weren't supposed to chew.
Just swallow and take it on faith.

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

Dear Buck Fever

Bright and boldly born, the foal’s shiny
skin is slick when I touch it.
Hope surely dwells in the hollows
of her stick-thin legs, after all
it’s the prop, the pillar that holds
us up too. The drought left us
with one cut of hay last summer,
little to graze, now weedy alfalfa
gets eight dollars a bale
if you can find it.
Most everyone sold out,
and I hear the stockpilers
have taken to sleeping with shotguns
in their barns. Honestly, BF, it’s easier
to rob a bank than to steal hay.
Marietta wanted to take the foal to the lake
but I told her she’d be better off using a gun,
seeing how the lake’s almost gone.

:: Ron Paul Salutsky, in Asheville Poetry Review (15:1, 2008)

Bobbie

For years Bobbie drove the pickup truck to Morrisville
every day to sew the flys in men’s pajamas at a factory
down there. When you spoke to her about the job,
she’d blush and turn on her heel like a little girl.
She was good. The best one down there.
It was piecework and she was fast.
She quit the sewing when she and Doug went to farming.

Bobbie is beautiful, or could be.
Under thirty years of work and plainness you can see
her body, see her face,
those definite, delicate features
glowing.
She strides like a doe.
In spite of two brown teeth
her smile is warm and liquid.

Last summer she cut off a finger in the baler,
paid her farmer’s dues.

Now she holds her missing finger behind her when she talks.
She’s got something new to blush for.

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