The Day I Got Fired from a Copywriting Job Because the Boss Said I was Too Good Looking

Decades ago, when women were considered
an accessory in the workplace—people to pinch
and poke and tell dirty jokes to, not colleagues
but play toys for all the men who liked to corner
us in the breakroom, trying to get a little kiss,
I was fired from my job for being a distraction.
The big boss called me into his ship-sized office
and proclaimed that since I’d been employed at
his radio station, his guy in charge of sales was
a useless idiot who couldn’t stop walking back
and forth in front of your office, trying to get
a load of you, he said, instead of doing his job.
And by the way, he told me, you can do a lot
better than Bob, like I, at nineteen, didn’t realize
a married, fifty-year-old chain smoker wasn’t
the best boyfriend for me. He sat there all smug,
kicking back in his giant leather chair, waxing
on about how there was a greasespot on my office
wall from his DJ’s leaning their heads against it
while trying to make time with a girl who was
too good looking for them, so he would have to
let me go. They know they haven’t got a shot, he
said, but they keep tryin’ so you gotta give ‘em
credit for that, chuckling like it was just a joke—
as if they deserved an atta boy from me. Then
he handed me a newly minted company calendar,
wished me luck in my future endeavors, and told
me to shut his big, boss-sized door on my way out.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including her latest collection, Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.