“MyKillAdoreHer” by Paul Martínez Pompa:
After standing for hours, the room begins to blur. Her mouth opens like an empty wallet as naked dolls march on.
*
“Untitled” by Xu Lizhi:
I swallowed a moon made of iron
They refer to it as a nail
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can’t swallow any more
All that I’ve swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.
*
“Business” by Naomi Shihab Nye:
What it is to be lonesome for stacked papers
on a desk, under glass globe,
brass vase with standing pencils,
new orders.
How quickly urgencies of doing disappear.
And where is the child from the next apartment,
whose crying kept him awake
these last terrible months?
Where do you file this unknowing?
*
“On the Loss of Energy (and Other Things)” by June Jordan:
IF YOU EAT MEAT
HOW YOU PLAN TO PAY THE RENT?
I SAID
THE OILWELLS DRIBBLIN
LOWER THAN A SNAKE
AND SOON WON’T BE NO HEAT
AND SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL EAT MEAT
EXCEPT THERE AINT NO
MEAT TO EAT
I SAID
*
“Vocation” by Sandra Beasley:
I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them
Help.
*
“Find Work” by Rhina P. Espaillat:
But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone,
her dishes, and how painfully they shone.
*
“Negative” by Kevin Young:
Only money keeps
green, still grows & burns like grass
under dark daylight.
*
“In the Year of ‘No Work’” by Michael Nienow:
. . . and the bait arced out over the tidal current
on a point in view of the town where I lived,
where I had become a man
with no money,
suddenly concerned only with money, for there were mouths
and I had helped to make them —
*
“What Work Is” by Philip Levine:
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
*
“Blood on the Wheel” by Juan Felipe Herrera:
Blood of the orphan weasel in heat, the Calvinist farmer in wheat
Blood of the lettuce rebellion on the rise, the cannery worker’s prize
*
“Shirt” by Robert Pinsky:
We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone . . .
*
“kitchenette building” by Gwendolyn Brooks:
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
*
“Calling Him Back from Layoff” by Bob Hicok:
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other
and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other
forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones
hear?
*
“How Things Work” by Gary Soto:
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
Is thrown into their faces.
*
“Work Shy” by Alex Phillips:
God sticks you with the smallest pins
and your blood, the red is diluted.
Imagine a tiny hole, the other side
of which is a fat world and how
lost you would feel. Of course,
I’m speaking to myself.
How lost I would feel, and how dangerous.
*
“At the Office Holiday Party” by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz:
I don’t know how to look like I’m not struggling.
*
“Nightshift at the Pool Hall” by Sean Thomas Dougherty:
to strive for a manifesto
written across a table’s mess with a wet dish rag
*
“Junk” by Richard Wilbur:
The heart winces
For junk and gimcrack,
for jerrybuilt things
And the men who make them
for a little money . . .
*
“To be of use” by Marge Piercy:
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
*