Tag: Work

The Church of the Dermatologist 

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Amy Miller
Featured Art: “Pony Up” by Alex Brice

I wonder if she says a prayer before
she bustles into the room, all smiles and sweet
accented English, tongue a rolling horse
in a field of Russian consonants. My feet  

or scalp or inner thigh might pronounce
a sentence on my life: she incants
asymmetry, border, color in three rounds,
four, the marketeer’s or pastor’s chant.  

She’s here-and-now, no penance crap to pay,
no questions of the beach, my tans, my youth,
for everybody’s sinned already, way
too late to rein those horses in. Truth: 

I did my praying driving here. Lord,
let her eye be ruthless. Thorough. Bored.  

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In Which I Compare My Brain Surgery to a Slope Mine

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Evan Gurney

Featured Art by Greg Rounds

Mine and mill have done their work,
the ridge face once lush with fir
and poplar now cleared of airy timber,
the brow slashed and bored, a strip
of railroad curling like a scar up
the mountain to the excavation’s cavity,
sealed now but still marking its territory,
still leaving its lasting impression.

Hidden from sight, a subterranean labyrinth
of crosscuts line like stitches the shaft
that slopes down and in through folds
and plunges to the precious stope
that engineers surveyed, prospected,
and, finally, removed entire, hoisting out
the bituminous ore, leaving behind a sump
that time and age will fill once more.

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To Be Stevie Nicks Cool

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jennifer Martelli

So many men love my friend:
her boyfriend and both ex-husbands build her a three-season porch,
all cedarwood and teak. Pine needles from her backyard

cover the almost-floor. I tell her she is sexual,
like Stevie Nicks. People can smell it like golden beer. They smell my indifference—
it smells like a New England Timber Rattlesnake, all scales,

black-tinged-gold, like a hole. I learned today in a crossword
that Venus has no moons. That was the down clue,
What Venus lacks that Earth has: _ _ _ _ _:

five letters—O and O—filled in already. She sends me
a video of the three men and their equipment: saws, nails, drills,
hammers, planes, pulleys, rope,

planks of wood, aromatic as a closet, some tool
with claws on both ends they toss back and forth, way too hot.

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Coworker

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kate Hubbard

You were spinning a top on the bar the night we met at happy hour. We had known each other for years. You gave me a poinsettia for Christmas once and I gave it away, left it in my mother’s picture window so she could end every phone call asking about the boy who gave me that nice flower.

I fell down your stairs. I lost myself in the gaze of your oak trees. I fell in and out of your bed when I wasn’t falling in and out of the Italian tenor’s bed. I met you over and over in the street crossing to the deli. I saw you in the parking lot. I forgot you when the gulls squawked, when my feet were sandy, when I took my lunch in bed.

I forgot you when it rained and the gutters overflowed. You sang to the fax machine. You counted your cigarette breaks. You tipped your hat and loitered by my window. I wore blue when you’d remember it. I drank apple ginger tea with my feet in a desk drawer.

I’d stamp your letters. I’d throw out the tenor’s bills. I was mistress of the postage meter. We’d muse about the smell of death in the walls, the drop ins in the drop ceiling. Some nights I’d roller skate around the file cabinets, overtime under the exit lights. You never let the coffee get cold.

You caught a deer mouse in a file folder. I caught a field mouse in an envelope box and sat by the train tracks watching the hawks pick off the chipmunks. I wore a green dress so the forest swallowed everything but my eyes. I told my mother I’d never love you.

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Triage

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Lance Larsen

Featured Art: Fresh Air, by John Schriner

My job is to mow. My job is to coax the prairie
around my  mother-in-law’s house into green
chaos, then decapitate it on Friday till it looks
like carpet. My other job is to say dang
it’s hot and enter the kitchen and sip juice
and nuzzle my beloved at the stove when her
mother’s back is turned—an eighty-seven-year-old
back but still super quick. My beloved
has her own job—open and close the fridge,
push me away, and keep some things
cold like cucumbers and Gouda and yogurt,
and others hot like caramelized onions
and yesterday’s sweet and sour, and pretend
her mother’s Alzheimer’s is a shrine we’ll visit
someday like the Taj Mahal and not daily triage.
I still have other jobs, like having cancer cells
burned from my face at 3:00. Or is it 3:30?
I check my phone. Oh good, 3:30, more time
to decapitate the prairie and sip juice
and maybe swim slippery laps at the rec center.

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I Should Know a Millionaire

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Erik Wilbur

Featured Art: Family by Harry Grimm, Nancy Dick, and Carolyn Williams 

two-jobs-having-scrubbers-of-piss-stains-from-pitted-grout-in-fast-food-bathrooms.

I’ve met my fair share of honest hunched-over-the-dish-pit-scraping-
nibbled-on-fork-fucked-duck-confit-into-trash-bins-SOBs.

You’ve hauled that trash to the alley tons of times. I’ve seen beads of sweat
on many American faces. I’ve seen a bead of sweat catch the right light        

on a man’s brow and then fall into a scrap-metal bin like a lost diamond.
Each of us should have how-we-made-it stories, instead of stories about waiting          

all day in a line that runs down a city sidewalk for nothing. Man, I’m tired
of only knowing broke-ass-just-tryin-to-get-by-motherfuckers,         

tired of seeing skinny dudes my age at intersections twirling cardboard arrows
or watching mothers put items back on grocery shelves after silently adding up     

the contents of their shopping carts. America, by now I thought
I’d know one millionaire, at least, ‘cause I’ve seen enough bootstrap-pulling     

to pull whole ghettos out of crab grass and chain link, enough to pull the bars off
every window and every kid off stray-bullet-stray-chihuahua-streets—

if no one were pushing down on them, I mean.

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The Pathologist’s Wife (or, When My Daughter Leaves the House I Will Go Watch Baby Sea-Turtles Being Born in Savannah)

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar 

Featured Art: American Gothic by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor Viny

Volunteer vacations. That’s what

I’ll do, so help me. Go away

for a week at a time or two. You know, have fun,

help out. Save some

baby turtles. And I’m not going

to ask. It’s my money too. Money’s not

an issue. My husband’s

a doctor. Well not

just a doctor, my Lord: a forensic pathologist.

More of a scientist, really. He puts away

murderers. We’ve had – he’s had

death threats. We’re absolutely

not in the phone book. And he is

so addicted to his work. He’s always thought

he can just hand me money and

that’s it. Though, he does expect his

meals.

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Mailing a Letter

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Dawn Davies

Featured Art: Evocation of Roussel by Odilon Redon

The letter came back from the post office so mangled
it was as if the mailman had plucked it out of my box
before being jumped by a clot of street thugs.
Then, still carrying his mail bag, stumbled into a bar
because it was the third time this year that he’d gotten jumped
in my neighborhood, and why do guys gotta pick on him
just because he’s short (under five-six don’t make a man,
his father always said). Then drank scotch and soda
until the bartender made him stop, walked the dimming
summer streets in search of his truck, slept in a doorway,
woke up and vomited into his mailbag, found his truck
and skulked home to his wife, who had sent all four children
to the neighbors and was waiting up in yesterday’s clothes,
with a suitcase and a left hook brewing. Because she hated
the late hours the USPS forced him to carry, and by “late hours”
they both know she meant his cheating with the tiny
Castilian woman two zip codes over, and this thought
that poisoned her days now propelled her to stomp on his mailbag
and kick it off the porch for all that the mailbag stood for:
the overtime, the philandering, the childless Castilian
with the twenty-two inch waist. But then when she saw his face
with his eyebrows tipped and sorry, and she knew
that he hadn’t been sneaking around, but had gotten into trouble,
she sat him down, fed him coffee, and washed his wounds
before sending him back out for his morning shift,
because they both needed him to keep this job
(there was a pension attached, she had secretly started divorce
proceedings, was hungry for the alimony).
And so he got back to work and wiped off the fouled, wretched
letters in his bag, feeding them through the system
before getting called into the supervisor’s, and because
the letter was wet, it got mangled in the maw of a sorting machine,
the address smeared and clotty, the stamp curled and dystonic,
and three weeks later, once the mailman was off probation,
the letter came back to him, smelling like machine oil and vomit,
clawed and shredded, stamped “Return to Sender,”
and he shoved it back in my mailbox with bite marks
from the beast that had mauled it, this letter to my father
on his deathbed, explaining why I wouldn’t be going to see him.

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Quail on the Airfield

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ellen Seusy

Winner, Editors’ Prize for Poetry, selected by Bianca Lynne Spriggs

In Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up
and pulls on coveralls and heavy boots.
He drives his truck along a narrow road
to the strip where jets line up for fuel,
heat already shimmering near the ground.

He works alone all day in the exhaust
and roar of jets, as planes take off and land.
He’s paid to save their engines from the birds.
All day, the heat accumulates; his clothes
go dark with grime and sweat, while sickening

fumes waver in the air. He knows this dance;
the quail softly tumble in his net.
He closes it to carry them across
the runway to where the tarmac ends, then
frees them in the sedge where he knows they nest.

Some mornings, when I would rather sleep
than go to work, I remind myself that
in Texas, near the Gulf, a man wakes up
and pulls on regulation boots, then goes
to sweep the quail gently in a net.

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Waitress in an All-Night Diner, West Virginia

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Rebecca Baggett

Featured Art: A small portion of the Fanny Bennett Hemlock Grove on one side of Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Old Mammoth Road by Carol M. Highsmith

Angels visit sometimes, close to dawn.
They cluster by the door, seem to scan the cars
as they turn in, as if waiting for something—
what, she doesn’t have a clue.

She’s forty-three, a bad cough (first cigarette
at fourteen), two divorces, a dragonfly tattoo
on her left shoulder blade. Tumble
of chestnut curls—not a gray hair yet—
imprisoned in a net, magnificent when released.
Terrible feet. She hasn’t told a soul
about the angels, not even her sister,
who knows everything else worth telling.

They aren’t as glorious as she’d imagined.
Their wings, in particular—tight-folded
against their backs—surprise her by their drabness,
dusty-brown as the sparrows that hop around
the parking lot and gorge on stale biscuits
she crumbles on her break. The angels’ eyes—
washed-out blues and greens with strange,
cat-like pupil-slits—track her as she winds
through tables, a pot of coffee in each hand,
or delivers platters heaped with pancakes, sausages,
fries.
                       Why me? she wonders,
her back tickling under their eerie gaze,
but can’t imagine. Until the night the boy—
he can’t be more than boy yet—plunges
through the door, white as biscuit dough
except two spots, fever-red, high on either cheek.
The pistol he grips trembling with every
shuddering breath.

The cook’s whistling an old Alabama tune
she almost recognizes. The trucker
in the back booth drops his toast, lunges
to his feet. The pistol wavers toward him,
and then the angel by the door lifts its hand
to beckon her. She feels her lips curl
into the smile she offers worn-out mothers,
fractious teens, men who look as though
they can’t endure another night alone.
Yanks off the net. Shakes down her waterfall
of hair. Takes the first step
toward whatever’s come to her.

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Florida Man Throws Alligator into Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Mitchell Jacobs

Featured Art: Alligators by John Singer Sargent

The attendant hands him a soda and turns her back, thinking
of straws—how she’s running low, and their candy-red stripes,
and the way everything here comes wrapped up in paper, and

then a 3½-foot alligator is clawing the air.
                                                                          As if she pressed
the wrong button on the register. Or maybe, during lunch rush,
she’d ignored an oncoming hurricane tossing them about.

In any case, she shrieks, finding for this alligator non sequitur
no earthly explanation. Back when the heavens functioned
with less subtlety, she might have turned to the logic of myth.

The god of rapacity took the shape of a lizard
to penetrate the food hall’s oil-glossed aperture.

Perhaps the oracle of Jupiter, FL on his faux-leather throne
delivers this cold-blooded message to confront corporate greed
teeth to teeth.
                        Not that the police have succeeded

in extracting a motive. The culprit’s Frosty-smeared lips are sealed.
His charge: assault with a deadly weapon. Yet it rings untrue.
For Florida Man, we need a more particular punishment:

accused of wielding a projectile reptile,
the defendant shall be flung naked
into the Loxahatchee Slough.

If indeed he is a criminal, there will be no proper dunking.
If he is a hero, he will don no duckweed laurel as he rises
from the mud. But the surveillance camera remembers:

it’s not so wide, the gap between the actual and the possible.
About the space from Nissan Frontier to take-out window
where an alligator, bewildered, sees the kitchen’s steam

like fog over a marsh in red bloom, smells the billows
of meaty fragrance, hears the gatekeeper’s yodel of welcome,
and for a moment
                                 flies.

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Henry’s Horses

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest
selected by Tony Hoagland

By Michael Pearce

Featured Art: In the Valley of Wyoming, Pennsylvania (Interior of a Coal Mine, Susquehanna) by Thomas Addison Richards, 1852

The old barrel warehouse across the street
had a ceiling so high there was weather inside.
Henry Gutierrez lived there—they said
he’d been there since before the war,
though they never said which war.
He worked at Anger’s garage all day
rebuilding engines, then came home
and slept a few hours, and when
he woke up after dark he’d knock back
a bowl of cereal and a couple beers.

If you looked over there at midnight you’d see
brilliant flashes coming from inside,
silent explosions, like lightning
trapped in a thunderless cage.
But it was only Henry’s arc welder,
he worked all night fusing together
sheets and scraps of steel until
they seemed to breathe and shake
and prance and strike a noble pose.
He built animals, mostly horses,
and he said he knew he’d finished one
when he found himself talking to it.

One time Uncle Jack, my father’s brother,
invited Henry to his church, the one
where they forgive you for anything
as long as you let Jesus into your heart
and drop a twenty in the basket.
But Henry knew there was no forgiving
his sins, and it made him sick
to talk about the people he’d injured
then listen to the other craven souls
tell him he was absolved. He said
he had his own way of atoning that
was mostly about wrestling with steel.

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Appropriate Interjection

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: Painting with Troika by Wassily Kandinsky

Seven in the morning laying insulation
and wiring electric with a friend and his friend
who make money building houses.
Laying insulation at seven on Saturday
because of a promise made the night before
at the bar, where the ambition to learn
something about house circuitry
appeared like a blown fuse. This pink shit
makes you itch. Not so with my friend here—
he’s worked with this stuff so long
he sleeps on it, wakes up
throws a piece in the toaster, eats it slowly
with cream cheese and coffee. Shouldn’t we
be wearing respirators or something?
How the hell should I know?
But this is good. This kind of work
is good for me—re-callous these grandma hands
I’ve grown. Like back in those summers
when I tar-sealed blacktop
on ninety-five-degree early mornings. “And then
in the afternoons,” I tell them. On break
we smoke a joint in front of the site, drink
water, sit there in silence. Silent like that
until I start to count breaths. And wonder
what happened to last night’s beer brotherhood.
But then I recognize the similarity
between our collective awareness
and the object of our unfocused gazes:
Margaret’s Creek, running muddy and a little high
along the other side of the road.
I could try to articulate this thought—
it might break the silence. Then again it might
make more, and I want to work with these guys
on future jobs, so instead I tell them how
I once caught a five-pound largemouth
a quarter-mile up this creek
that jerked so hard in my grip
she stuck two of the treble hook barbs
from the top-water Rapala I caught her with
into my thumb, how I tried for an hour
to loosen them from the nerve, feeling it
in my front teeth, fish in the water, gone,
how I had to push the points
clear through the side of my thumb
and clip the barbs with rusty wire cutters.
“Sure,” I add, “there’s good fishing in this creek
if you know the good holes.”
Then my friend’s friend holds out his left thumb,
a nubby little thing, tells us about an accident
he had with a circular saw.

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Let Me Bore You With My PowerPoint

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lee Upton

Featured Art: Answer Me by Anri Sala

—after Peter Porter’s “Let Me Bore You With My Slides”

I’ll say it and I’ll say it and I’ll say it again
and here it’s said for us, illuminated. Do you like my wave effects?
The technology will be bypassed any day now. I know. So?
How did that get in? That’s my kid.
Ha ha. That’s a goat Brenda and I saw blocking the road in Brixton.
Look at the head on that.
Oh—Brenda. Sorry. There goes my job. Just kidding.
That’s not really Brenda. That’s her best friend. No, just kidding.
We were on a wildflower walk, you know? Walking by a stream and
they had these
statues that look amazingly real? I don’t know how they do it.
Carve mushrooms or something and magnify them into these enormous—
we’re moving on. Oh, here we go, our Venn diagram—
why is Brenda wearing antlers?
Okay. On track.
You know, I say something and then what I say is right up here.
I might as well just give away handouts and leave the class.
Tempting. I mean I could go home right about now.
Right when it’s least expected.
Except I’m a professional. I meant to crop that.
That shouldn’t be embedded.
Nice 3-D effects, if I do say so myself.

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The Muse of Work

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Ellen Bass

Featured Image: “Portrait of Mrs Marie Jeanette de Lange” (1900) by Jan Toorop

If I could choose my muse,
she’d have red hair, short, spikey,
and green cateye glasses with rhinestones at the tips.
She’d wear a sleeveless white blouse, ruffled
over shallow scallop-shell breasts.
Can you see how young she is?
I think she’s the girl Sappho loved,
the one with violets in her lap.
When she opens the door, a flurry of spring,
apple blossoms and plum, sweeps in.
But I’ve been assigned the Muse of Work.
It turns out she’s a dead ringer for my mother
as she scrambles the eggs, sips black coffee,
a Marlboro burning in a cut-glass ashtray.
Then she opens the store. The wooden shelves shine
with amber whiskeys and clear vodkas,
bruise-dark wine rising in the slender necks.

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Yet

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Torgersen

Featured Image: “Study for “Le Bain”: Two Women and a Child in a Boat” by Mary Cassatt

You’ve got to act, and soon, but you don’t dare yet.
There’s one big load you don’t think you can bear yet.

You chose to dive this deep; it’s not for me
to tell you why you can’t come up for air yet.

You had big plans. You’re running out of time.
There’s no excuse to contemplate despair yet.

All that time and trouble spent on you.
For all the rest, you don’t have much to spare yet.

The world should find some meaning in your work?
You haven’t shown us why we ought to care yet.

Don’t give me that I-don’t-get-it look.
Sixty-five, and still not self-aware yet.

You might just want to start to pack your bags.
You may not have enough to pay the fare yet,

but that doesn’t mean the taxi’s not on its way.
Look out the window. No, it isn’t there. Yet.

Call it what you will, but thank something, Eric.
There’s one stiff suit you haven’t had to wear yet.

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Stupid Sandwich

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Nathan Anderson

Featured Image: “The Grocer’s Encyclopedia” by an unknown artist

So yeah, we all have these moments that suck
because what they mean
is like a mystery, like the Mariners last year
good a team as any, traded
what’s-his-name, the fat one, for that Puerto Rican dude
with a wicked right arm
and didn’t even make the playoffs.
Anyway, I can see you’re a man of the world like me,
standing here I don’t know how long and still
no damn bus. But like I was saying
we all have these moments and last week
there I was after work, making a stupid sandwich,
the kind of stupid-ass food people like me always make
when I can’t figure out what I’m feeling
and I feel like being true to myself
is about the dumbest thing a man can do,
knowing how easy it is for the truth to mess things up.

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Carnival Nocturne

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Wagenaar

Peanut shells crackle beneath your pink slippers
as you pace. The players behind routines of a different sort
long after the show is over, long after the spectators
return home, their caricatures slipping from their grasp
as they unlock the front door. Teeny the strongman
is calling the torn names in the phone book
he ripped in half, as Vasserot listens outside, smoking
a cigarette with his left foot, his arms a phantom
presence he feels each time he reaches for another can
of peaches. Karlov the Great has gone to bed
regretting his dinner, three light bulbs & a seven-foot
feathered boa, while in the next room Madame Sossman
is about to win a red nose & a pair of floppy shoes,
unless Noodles can beat three Hangmans.
Monsieur LeBeau stands in the big tent, still listening
to the cheers of the departed crowd. His daughter
won’t return his phone calls, but tomorrow
will bring a new town, with a different name & story,
where anything is possible, & tonight the stars’ white flames
burn on their blue wicks – she’s out there, somewhere,
the one you left behind on the Serengeti, in the night
that paces in a circle with its one black shoe, beneath wires
no one will ever see, the sickle moon’s ivory
as beautiful as your tusks once were.

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