Explore Poems: Jobs & Working

my job used to be teaching a machine
to recognize complaints filed against police officers
that contained…

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’…

We inhaled slag wool in the throat
of a Tennessee summer, installing cheap

can lights, like capping off…

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
    ⁠The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
    With large…

But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and...

late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias
scaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,
her gloves white, her…

1
Sunday      vellum tongues with words of prayer
Monday    messages from the unknown
Tuesday     how to…

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they …

1.   Yellow paint on brush.
    Black body leaning in wind.
    Mustached man. Father.
2.  House yellow…

our wages: hourly: paid not in effort or labor but in the value of  being  present
in attempt to ignore the empty glass: the glass fills up with itself.
the language of dreams always continues with  and then/ is described
in unreachable tangible...

He was jailed for cruelty to insects, and his agent wasn’t answering the phone, so he stayed awake in the cell all night, pictures jumping around his head of the cops and the blowdryer they took as evidence. He used...

I wear a flower in my lapel.
I like the sweetness of its lie in my nose.
A carnation, the fool’s flower,

its heart a wilting empire.
In late-night editing sessions,
I imagine I’m planting flowers

in the sockets of eyes. Whatever helps
me reach our rigor...

I am so in love with the female CEO.
My checks come on time and I saw the livestream of  her speaking…

Buenos dias and hasta lue$o in boardrooms and strategy sessions, Where are your grateful holiday smiles bilinguals? I've given you a voice, let you in
to hear old friends tell old jokes,
Stop flinching, Drink eggnog, Hum alon,
Not carols we hear
whimpering
children too...

Broken Earth
Year of Release: 1939
Running Time: 11 minutes
Cast: Clarence Muse and unidentified boy

I am the sick boy in the shack when the camera opens
On the sunrise and wispy silhouettes of the plow
And the fool mule and my father working a...

my parents were born from a car. they climbed out
& kissed the car on its cheek. my grandmother.
to be a first generation person. 23 and Me reports
i am descendant of pistons & drive trains. 33%
irrigation tools. you are what you...

A woman moves through a Cloud Hands position,
                        holding and rotating

an invisible globe—thud, shattering glass, moan,
                        horn blast—so many

worlds to this world—two men dipnet
                        sockeye salmon

at the mouth of a river—from a rooftop, a seagull
                        squawks and cries;

a woman moves...

Swarte smekyd smepes smateryd wyth smoke.
dryue me to deth wyth den of here dyntes.
Swech noys on nyghtes ne herd men neuer.
what knauene cry & clateryng of knockes
þe cammede kongons cryen after col col.
& blowen here bellewys þat al here brayn...

‘þis were a wikkede wey but whoso hadde a gyde
þat [myȝte] folwen us ech foot’: þus þis folk hem mened.
Quod Perkyn þe Plowman, ‘By Seint Peter of Rome!
I haue an half acre to erie by þe heiȝe weye;
Hadde I eryed...

Too black, too much indulged, living in clover,
all little withers, all air, all charity,
all crumbling, all massing in a choir—
damp clods of soil, my land and liberty...

With early plowing it is black to blueness,
and unarmed labor here is glorified—
a thousand...