Tag: sales

Elegy For a Used-Car Salesman by Vincent Antonio Rendoni

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Elegy For a Used-Car Salesman

You tell me you’re having a good month
without telling me you’re having a good month.

Sunday morning out at Denny’s. Just you & me.
You’re wearing the black polo with the piping.

Everyone knows your name.
You know the waitresses’ names.

Get whatever you want.
I’ll have what you’re having,

the only 13-year-old with a plate
of Egg Beaters & chicken-fried steak.

We cheer our bottomless coffees,
thick with Sweet‘N Low, drowned in cream.

Do you want to know my secret?
Give me your greatest hits.

You extend your hand. I extend mine.
You look me dead in the eye.

It starts with how you start.
A limp-dick handshake? That’s no way to sell a car.

Give ‘em one of these. One pump.
& another. Two. No more. No less.

Have mints. No gum.
Toothpicks at the ready.

Say your name. Ask them theirs.
I say my name. I say yours.

Say they deserve it.
Give them permission.

You’re not selling a Toyota. You’re selling the asphalt,
the sky, the chance to do it all over.

I say it: you deserved that
& more.

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Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of Dead Chicano Mixtape (Red Hen Press, 2027) & A Grito Contest in the Afterlife (Catamaran, 2022), winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter & Pleiades. He lives in White Center, WA.

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Orientation by Jacob Butlett

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Orientation

During my first week as a sales associate
at the Kennedy Mall, the assistant manager,
a white woman in a tight black blouse,
told me in a low voice, I’m not racist,
but many of the customers who steal
from us are Black, so keep that in mind.
I was speechless. Behind me, lava lamps
glowed bright red, as if blood were oozing
in their cylindrical prisons. I was seventeen.
A closeted white boy from Iowa. My high school
teachers warned me about casual racism—how it
can come across as benign but is really evil.
I looked at my assistant manager as she hurried off
to ring up a customer, & I wondered whether
my co-worker was evil for saying such a thing.
I stood stock-still by the lava lamps, not knowing
whether to be offended, glancing at the luminous
blobs drooping again & again. I felt like that,
melting from the inside out, burning hot.

*

Jacob Butlett has an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He teaches first-year composition at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and works as the Head Poetry Editor at Blue Earth Review. Jacob’s creative works have been published in many journals, including Colorado Review, The Hollins Critic, Crab Orchard Review, and Lunch Ticket. Jacob received an Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize (Graduate Prize). He is the author of the poetry book Stars Burning Night’s Quiet Rhapsody (Kelsay Books, 2024).