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)

Pauline on the Bar Tacker

Bill put me on bar tacking
once he saw I could do most anything.
It was piece work then.
I think we started off at $1.90
per hundred dozen. Seemed
like easy money at the time.
We finally got up to $2.90 per 100.
I was doing about 500 to 550 a shift.
One day Bill had a mean spell on, said,
"Pauline, I'll bet money you can do 600."
I said, "You are dreaming big now."
But I did get 604 dozen two days in a row.
As far as I know no one else has ever got that many.
In eight hours. It liked to a killed me.

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

First Day

Still astonished to be starting
     Work at twelve o'clock at night,
I passed through the dark streets
     By the river, that first Sunday
In another life, carrying my lunch-
     Box and steel-toed shoes toward
Those enormous ovens I'd be
     Laboring beneath till morning.
Left alone below the mill floor,
     I shoveled shale into the waters
Rushing beyond me like an opened
     Main, and could hear above me
The shear and clamor of metals,
     Crane whistles, ingots thundering
Along their beds to be rolled
     Through a series of presses.
I learned that day how time ran
     In the gears and drive trains
Of machinery, how time burned
     Inside furnaces in the great fires
Of creation and spread out evenly
     In sheets of steel. That night,
For the first time, I counted
     The hours coming on, one by one,
And passed through them without
     Sleep. Finally, that morning,
I watched the sun bloom in a sky
     Filled with mill smoke and
Sparrows rising from their baths
     Of dust, the blue fuse of ozone
From the wires above the trolleys.
     I learned how each new day
Was a promise light made to dust
     Before breaking, which the river
Took with it and emptied downstream.
     How the streets were a promise,
And the surge of current through
     The line--a song that the blood,
The humming wires, would take up
     Again with each new morning,
Just as though it were the first.

:: Robert Gibb, The Origins of Evening (Norton, 1998)

Farmworker as Existential Quantifier

That one waters
his mortgaged field

& becomes the water.
Another drinks the water

dissolving into drills.
The quickest one coffins

into the trench with his wife.
They are there so long

a plow gives them last rites.
A child is born on that

hottest day in mid-strike.
He swallows the crop

& waddles away a god.
Without any fuel workers

sell their own steam.
Their labors are packed

into a papoose & carried
off. One of them pours

the water onto his rags.
The rest of them catch

the wringed water
in their mouths.

:: Rodney Gomez, in Devil's Lake (Spring 2012)

The Retired Welder Turns to Gardening

He's gentler now. His swollen hands that worked
on almost every dam in Alabama,
bending steel to fit the concrete seams,
now cradle seeds. His fingers poke the holes
in dirt made rich with cow manure; they drop
the seeds and bury them snug; they pull the weeds;
they pinch tobacco worms from ripe tomatoes.
In younger days his fingers knew the tricks
of prying bottle caps and winding tight
his belt around his fist as the boy stood by,
waiting for his licks. His pitching arm
could lob a whiskey bottle eighty feet,
and he loved the laughing sound of shattered glass
almost as much as his torch's private hum.
Now he no longer loves those things.
The garden, sloping down a hundred feet
to overlook the K-Mart and Dairy Queen,
is mostly meant to fill his table: peas,
zucchini, crookneck squash, collard greens,
a fig tree, okra tapering like knives.
He's generous with what he grows, although
his son looks bemused at the sacks of greens,
and rolls his eyes at boiling them with hamhocks.
The boy (he cannot help but think of him
as still a boy) prefers his fig preserves.
The old man brings collards anyway.

While he loves his garden's fruits, still more
he loves the oddities. He keeps a patch
of scrubby cotton to show his granddaughters,
plucking bolls and guiding their fingertips
through fibrous clouds to the sticky seeds within.
His sunflowers turn their showy heads and nod,
obedient to the bruised and jet-streaked dusk.
The gourds he hangs from twine, stretching out
their necks, twisting them around poles,
bending not with fire now but time.
As he walks between the rows, the stray cats
he feeds all gather at his heels and follow,
their greedy purrs subdued to background murmur.
The children, the boy and his girls, don't come as much
as he would like, but every time he shows
them how to feel the cotton seeds, and gives
each one a dried-out gourd with a corkscrew neck.
He's gentler now, more patient. The things he loves
will bend to him no more with fire, but time.

:: Juliana Gray Vice, History in Bones (Kent State, 2001)