Tag: Peaches

Jackhammers by Ed Aust

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Jackhammers

These men in my neighbor’s backyard
slick with sweat, hunched over jackhammers
demolishing a concrete slab
dark currents run through them
hydraulic hoses coil at their feet
like blue snakes as they
pulverize stone into aggregate

and I’m back in that dust-covered orchard
late summer ‘75
my first and last day on the job
sorting peaches on the platform
of a twelve-ton tractor they call
the Trunk Shaker
careening through the tight tree rows
clamping the trunks with giant pincers
and rattling the peaches off their branches

and down rain the ripe peaches
and down storms the debris
of dust and twigs and fruit fuzz
and down cascades leaves and bugs
and bird nests
that roll onto the rubber conveyer
in the sweltering August heat
as I cough exhaust
and absorb the machine’s shock waves
and dodge the whipping branches
and sidestep the deadly trunks
and toss away the bad fruit
and swat away the stink bugs
and wipe the sweat from my eyes
and for ten hours straight
I try to stay alive
to get those peaches in
before they rot

all that day I rehearse the words
I will tell the foreman, Sorry,
I can’t come back, I can’t work on Sundays,
which is a lie and of course he knows it
but he pays me my day’s wage
and lets me go in silence

and from my bedroom window now I watch
as fine dust rises from the mens’ pneumatic chisels
settles on their work boots like sifted flour
as behind dust masks they shout
in exhausted words I can’t understand
and I know they’ll be back tomorrow
and the next day and the next
to finish the job
as I finish folding my laundry
and set my shirts into their quiet drawers

*

Ed Aust lives in Oakland, California. His poems have appeared in The MacGuffin, Avocet, Coal City Review, California Quarterly, Stonecoast Review, The Reed, Watershed, Algebra of Owls, and San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Three Poems by Eric Goldfarb

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Discharge Instructions

At the hospital exit the nurse handed me six pages of things that could go wrong. She said most of them would not. This was meant to calm me.

Outside, a man in a blazer argued with the parking machine as if it had taken a side.

I signed where they told me, initialed the smaller lies— yes I understood the wound, yes I understood the pills, yes I understood how a body could be sent home with instructions.

In the car you held the plastic basin in your lap, pale and royal, like somebody being carried from a bad hotel.

We stopped at CVS. I bought gauze, ginger ale, the good crackers—the ones that cost too much, because illness has a lobby, a gift shop, a way of making saltines look like mercy.

At home I put the pages under a magnet shaped like Maine.

For three days I read them the way some people read scripture.

At midnight I touched your forehead. At two I touched it again.

Nothing happened.

Which is also a thing that happens.

*

Booth Four, 11:15

She slides the toast across before he asks.
He tips the creamer into her cup first,
though she has not yet lifted it. Then come
the pills: four of his beside the spoon, two
of hers beside the salt, sorted last night
and carried in the same green mint tin
they have used since the pharmacy changed bags.
A refill comes. He lays his hand flat on
the table so the waitress will not splash her.
When the strawberry arrives, one on the plate,
he moves it to her side without remark.
She eats half, then returns what is left to his.
Outside the window, a bus pulls to a stop.
Nobody gets off.

*

Peaches, Late August

At the peach stand, we both reach toward the bin
and press our thumbs against the ones that give,
not for ourselves. I find one soft and warm,
the kind that bruises looking at it, pass it
to your side of the table without comment.
You have chosen mine already. Farther down,
the farmer stacks his last few empty crates.
A woman holds a melon to the light.
You weigh three peaches in your open palm,
set two aside, and hand me back the one
I would have wanted. It is almost too ripe.
We pay. We walk. You take the paper bag
and hold it slightly out from your body
so the weight will not swing against my hip
the whole way home.

*

Eric Goldfarb writes poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. His work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta, Georgia. More at eric-goldfarb.com.