Tag: work

Stripping Tobacco by Jason Roberts

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Stripping Tobacco

The barn light
catches the dance
of amber dust
in the cold air
and casts long shadows
of Geneva and Clifton.

There are others,
but I only remember them.
Our silence is shared,
the way work is shared
when hands know what to do.

Leaves move through their fingers,
practiced and sure.
Through mine—
slower,
uncertain,
learning.

We strip them
clean,
sorting
pile from pile.
The air is dry and sweet,
thick enough
to tighten my throat
and settle in my clothes.

A radio in the corner.
Two Sparrows in a Hurricane
drifts through dust.
Then a Vince Gill song—
heard,
and left alone.

Her hands are fast,
controlled and rough.
He stands close.

Their eyes move
only between the leaves.
This will be Christmas money.

Nothing is said.
Nothing needs to be.
The night deepens and thins,
hours lengthen
and songs end.

When I think of stripping tobacco,
I do not think of words.
I think of standing,
hands moving,
dust floating,
my grandparents—
their quiet,
the hours,
the work,
and the way we stood together.

*

Jason Roberts is a social worker and therapist from Kentucky. He grew up on his grandfather’s farm, where the land became the center of his imagination. His work explores memory and the rural spaces that shaped his attention.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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The Old Neighborhood

Frankie was working with a crew
replacing a roof in the old
neighborhood when two women

passed on the sidewalk below.
Frankie wolf-whistled, put
his hands behind his head

and gyrated his hips while
the other guys laughed. It was
a long day under a brutal sun

and harassing women was
one of the few perks of the job.
But it was a mistake

to target two women who
had grown up in the neighborhood
and knew a thing or two about

men. Annie, who was ten years
older than Frankie but looked
half her age, was a prison guard

and Maria, a teacher at
Southside High, had grown up
with four brothers. Annie

squinted at Frankie, pointed
and shouted I know who you are.
You’re Mario’s little brother.

Your mother Anastasia Zaveni
scrubbed floors every night of her life
after your pig of a father

left her with seven kids to raise
by herself. It would break
her heart to hear her son

yell at women on the
street, women who have sons
of their own. And Maria

joined in, shouting I’m going
over to Ruth Street right now
to tell Anastasia

you’re a pig just like your
father. And
Big Man Frankie shrank

to a small boy and pleaded
in a voice Annie and Maria
could barely hear

Oh please don’t tell my mother.
Please don’t. Annie could hear
the pain in his voice

and remembered Anastasia’s
shame at her poverty
and pride in her boys

and she knew she and Maria
would never tell Anastasia.
But the guys on the crew

roared with laughter
at Frankie getting schooled
by two tough broads,

and the rest of the day
the foreman gave Frankie
the roughest jobs on

the hottest part of the roof
and when Frankie complained
the other guys who now

remembered their own mothers,
sisters, wives and daughters
told him to shut his trap

or they would tell his mother
what a miserable excuse of a man
she’d raised.

*

Summers

Klaus and I painted
my house waiting
for my son to be born
Mac and I delivered
gravel all summer

The summer I taught
fourteen year old boys
unsteady in their desks
the summer the cop
arrested me in pity

The summer my first wife
fled from me and I woke
in the back of a truck
with men speaking Spanish

But that was long before
I woke every dawn
to swim two miles
beside the old man
who loved everyone

My son was born blue
in summer my daughter
pink in summer I remember
The summer of our delinquency
The summer of our deliverance

The summer I stole a surfboard
and spent the whole day
riding waves to shore

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Mrs. T’s by Jeanine Walker

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Mrs. T’s

Middle-of-the-night pierogies is not my norm,
but it once was. I came home late after a shift
at the AMC Theatres or Wendy’s
and started the water to boil. So many of the foods
I love are a conduit for butter, and this was no
exception: buttered sautéed onions, fresh
broccoli if we had it, and the once-frozen, now-
boiled pierogies moved to sizzle with the butter in the pan.
I could fry them to their perfect crisp, their dough
browned, ready to slice, then bite, the warm
mix of potato and cheddar replacing whatever
hunger I might’ve felt, what hunger for a missing
parent, the necessity of two teenaged jobs,
the bare loneliness of that house. Father
gone. Brother gone, brother out.
When I ate the pierogies I must’ve known someone
cared I didn’t eat only the stale popcorn
I brought home. Me at the counter those summer
Thursday nights, sautéing, slicing, savoring.

*

Jeanine Walker is the author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2022) and the recipient of a 2025 microgrant for Korean poetry translation from Seattle City of Literature. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, and her poems and translations have found homes in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Jeanine teaches poetry and publishing in Seattle, where she runs a comedy-infused poetry event called It Goes On.

Five Poems by James Feichthaler

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Lines written on the 27th minute of my lunch hour in a Wawa parking lot

As the weeks deliver blow upon dull blow
To our sophisticated, fast-paced lives,
Keeping to schedules, always on the go,
With no time for ourselves in nine-to-fives,
“Surviving” mostly means that we’ll cut corners
While settling for fixes ’stead of cures;
From drive-thru grabs to greasy touchscreen orders
Of sloppy subs, a lunch hour’s breaded snares.
And even as these hurried words truck forth
From time-stressed regions of my anxious brain,
Some sparrows make a pit stop on the earth
And bathe in dirt, too long awaiting rain;
Shake off the dust their wings accumulate,
Then dart away, with nowhere to be late.

*

Sidewalk suns

Some call them “weeds,” these yellow miracles
That pushed through stone and found a way to thrive
Amongst the rubble’d ruins of this pavement;
Amidst the cracks and root-disjointed hills
(Of concrete) that have made it hard to move
Along these lanes, so desperate for improvement.
Most call them eyesores, born to be plucked out
And ripped from where their like has taken refuge,
As if their mere existence were too much
For eyes that can’t enjoy or won’t appreciate
Their growing here; fools’ gold, but double-rich
For their vitality: so heavenly huge
To the ants that wander by each grounded sun,
Who must look up at what dull souls look down upon.

*

So much baggage

I stop to watch him slide across the gravel,
His shelly suitcase proudly on display;
Horns pointing north, the safest way to travel
About these parts on such a gloomy day.
The path that leads to my apartment steps
Doesn’t see much traffic; byways clogged with moss
And wayward weeds have slowed the sleepy progress
Of many a tiny snail. The broad, slicked tops
Of dandelions are swaying on the breeze,
As he slimes toward his goal: a patch of grass
Spring suns have turned lime-green. His casual pace
Knows nothing of the scale-tipping stress
We mortals lug around; nor can we tell
What weight of worlds he’s learned to carry so well.

*

Such rarities abound

Those rush-hour miracles we mostly miss
While speeding down the highway into work,
Unheralded lights, which mostly we’ll dismiss
As hardly being worth a second search,
Call to us from the roadside, from up high,
In scattered bunches, singularly rare;
From shadowy places, sans celebrity,
Shout to us in their silence to “inquire.”
The tiniest weed that flourishes in the cracks
(Of a corroded guardrail) beat the odds
And shows so much resilience in its flex;
And where some tulips flaunt their ivory buds,
Unbuttoning in a ditch to taste the sun,
Their swaying might just save us from the gun.

*

Luck be a ladybug

To see this good-luck creature, on a day
When nothing’s going right or going my way,
Is to have proof that there’s a real order
To the things, both great and small, that see us suffer;
Is to imagine God as one great prankster,
Forever pulling the strings that set us up
For idiot choices, love, loss, epic failure,
Elated when our best-laid futures flop.
Or could this chance encounter with a lady
(Who picked spring’s chilliest day to wear all red)
Be no more palpable than any “maybe”
That the best philosophers have all deemed dead
And pointless to proclaim as ever being,
Beyond our mortal scope or supernatural seeing?

*

James Feichthaler is a poet with roots in the Philadelphia-area residing in Trenton, NJ, where he watches the skies for UFOs, sings Irish folk songs on his porch, and drinks beers. His new book From the Back Porch of a War (Parnilis Media 2024) pulls no punches in its assessment of a politically-divided America seemingly at war with itself, searching for moral integrity in a hashtag-hardened, spiritually-bankrupt world.

Four Poems by Kimberly Ann Priest

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In the News, December 31, 1980

The final day of the year before my sister is born,
two people die in a local gas station explosion that no one
can explain, as winter warms up her roar from the Ohio Valley
to overpower all the Northeast, and five Connecticut men,
employees of City Printing Co., go missing in a small plane
over Lake Michigan. Governor Milliken has signed new bills
into law to restructure Blue Cross Blue Shield,
a massive tax-exempt, non-profit health insurer created
forty-one years prior. “We made more progress in six days,”
says the Governor, “than we did in the past six years,”
addressing employee complaints concerning injured and laid-off
workers who weren’t receiving benefits, as well as employer
complaints of system abuse and expense. Still,
the sun will be shinning tomorrow morning, temperatures mild
even as energy audits roll out for home dwellers to cut
heating costs. Which is good because tonight we are getting
two to four inches of snow as bright Jupiter and Saturn cozy up,
appearing merely two moon-widths apart by pre-dawn
when you can view them if you want to. Next month,
Reagan will be our nation’s president, and I think my parents
are happy. A volcano has erupted in Vancouver, Washington,
and the Communist Party has announced to the Polish
that this new year will not be prosperous as the country
continues its path toward socialist development. There are deaths
on the streets of California again due to the introduction
of a new illicit drug that is not “White China,” but almost the same,
while X-rated gingerbread women and men are sold
at a shop in Maryland featuring prominent sex organs
as well as big smiles. They aren’t illegal so the Moral Majority
can’t do a damn thing to stop them being sold. What is it
my mother keeps saying? There’s nothing new under the sun.
The Beach Boys have a star in Hollywood now—been a band
twenty years. Bright Jupiter and Saturn won’t be this close again
until 2020 when I’ll miss them again. Dad’s part-time job
pays some of the bills and gifts us Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Our home is barely warm enough to insulate bodies from winter,
but I’ve got a hot water bottle and Pooh Bear in bed.

*

Recession [early 80s]

          Birch Run, Michigan

Childhood
was good.

I didn’t know my parent’s poverty. Didn’t know
we rationed food because

I was out buzzing with bees—
white bursts of pollen floating

and the farmhouse
a yellow brushstroke against the corn-pierced sky.

Mother put the baby on the floor
before the car careened and spun. Summer

swooped like a starling around heads
protecting, the grasses bowing to breeze

like old Moses in Genesis leaning against his cane,
surrendering causes to a new generation.

I remember wild eyes and lore,
before seatbelts were lawful,

mother panting with miracle after arriving home safe,
no car or human damage, the baby

quieted and falling asleep.
She pointed to heaven, to Jesus,

when a rash of needle pricks covered my back—allergies
demanding so much medication. Cattails

grew thick and tall in the ditches, their inches
of stalk below the plateau

assuring I was just the same height. These days,
one must like apples

or applesauce,
or mustard shag carpet—something yellow

such as forsook corn hardened for crows,
or Queen Bee bushy all over pollinating red clover,

hovering the spiney pink globes,
deciding, asserting you, you, you,

you must like applesauce,
eat every last bite, to not taste the bitter white sprinkles

un-capsuled and tossed
into the sweetest luxury food stamps allowed.

I wished it could have been ice cream. It wasn’t.
Yellow ball of daytime sun gone down

as I ate the coveted portion, with spoon,
that no one else got, bees

all tired and sleeping, the baby
bundled for night.

*

After My Father Losses His Job, My Medicine Runs Out

And we lose our healthcare
          like most unemployed families do,
so my mother lifts the empty bottle
          of allergy medication
that keeps me breathing during the greener seasons
          toward heaven (toward
our farmhouse kitchen ceiling) one late
          Wednesday evening after mid-week church
and after the last pill is broke open
          into my applesauce where I, a four-year-old child,
am willing to consume it. She has
          no other option and a little girl
who loves to go outside: it’s Jesus
          or nothing. Oh Lord, she intones, be good to me
throwing the bottle away. She will still
          give me applesauce each evening without
the white medicinal sprinkles, still
          pray nervously, still wake each morning
to feed me breakfast and watch me rush
          out our front door
like an anxious little bee difficult
          to contain. Some kids, I have learned,
grow out of seasonal allergies. Who knows?
          Maybe that was me. Oh Lord
be good my mother prayed
          as I rolled in the summer grass like a skinny cat
fighting off its fleas. As I marched
          into the woodland’s verdant trees.
As I ate my applesauce; in return, offering my mother
          sticks, pretty stones, dead leaves.

*

Locusts

          1981

We searched for wild honey and found it late March
          oozing from maple trees, declaring our woodlands
miraculous. Miracles! Miracles! we hollered,
          demanding the wind turn north or south
at our command. My little brother lifts a stick and strikes a rock.
          Water! he proclaims, hitting the rock
harder, promising a gusher and sputtering noises to mimic
          its fake flow. We drank
from that rock and the wind and the trees. We imagined
          meaty bugs and ate them, pretending their winged bodies
wriggled in our teeth. We listened for the forest,
          pausing along a well-worn path to stand very still
and discern its murmur. Follow, follow, it said.
          So we followed the inspirited tickle of leaves
in gentle breeze above us, limbs swaying and guiding west
          then east. We were such good pantheists
wandering a wilderness like John the Baptist on transcendental
          mission, stalking our Bible’s feral God.

*

Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press 2025) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021, finalist for the American Best Book Awards. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives with her husband in Maine.

Call for Submissions: Poems About Work

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Call for Submissions: Poems About Work

The Book of Jobs: An Anthology of Poems About Work (Online) 

How to Submit: Email up to three poems of (up to 150 lines each) in the body of an email to:

oneartworkpoems [at] gmail [dot] com

Please also include a 3rd-person bio of up to 50 words.

Submission Window: April 13—July 12, 2025

Anticipated anthology publication date: Fall 2025

Fee/payment: No submission fee. Contributors to receive a $10 honorarium per accepted poem (thanks to a donation from an anonymous donor). The anthology will be available online at no cost to readers.

Requirements: Previously unpublished poems are preferred (though it’s fine if you have shared them on personal sites, including social media). We will consider poems that have been published in literary journals if the rights have reverted to the poet; please indicate this in your submission. Simultaneous submissions are permitted; please reply to your own emailed submission to let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

What We’re Looking For: 

• Poems about all types of labor (industrial, agricultural, corporate, healthcare, domestic, creative, hospitality, caregiving, education, sports, and other fields of work).

• A variety of styles: narrative, persona, documentary, formal, experimental, erasure, cento, abecedarian, prose poems, etc.

• Serious poems, funny poems, seriously funny poems

• While we welcome poems about your own work experiences, we hope you’ll also consider submitting poems about the work of others, including family members, historical figures, or people you’ve observed, interviewed, or researched.

Sample work poems we admire:

“What Work Is” by Philip Levine

“Invisible Work” by Kwoya Fagin Maples

“Taking It Home to Jerome” by David Kirby

“Night Waitress” by Linda Hull

“Shirt” by Robert Pinsky

We’re looking forward to reading your work about work!

With all best wishes,

Erin Murphy

Editor, The Book of Jobs: An Anthology of Poems About Work

www.erin-murphy.com

Publisher: ONE ART: a journal of poetry

Two Poems by Vincent Casaregola

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Night at the Convenience Store

It’s not like there’s something wrong,
not like you’d think—no inner demon
willing me to kill or be killed, inspiring
some direct-to-video tragedy—

what I hear is softer, a whisper
of secrets and the sound of shadows
sliding slowly over hollow space,
someone else’s ghosts, not mine.

Some people broadcast themselves,
and I, despite myself, receive
an endless chain of repetitious fears,
the plainsong of pathetic histories.

At home, at night, the soft sounds
of furnaced air surrounding me,
I’d still find no peace, deafened almost
by the family’s atonal dreams.

So now I work the graveyard shift at the
convenience store, as ghosts come and go,
some in awkward bodies, some in minds,
and a few, just a few, carried on the wind.

*

In the Sunlight

Black letters, “Do Not Cross,”
on shiny yellow tape, rising and
falling on the afternoon breeze,
rustling, surrounding the site

Bright yellow, with black numbers,
the bent plastic markers, just like
what restaurants use to tag the order,
scattered randomly on black asphalt

Brass casings, cast like seed
on hard ground, some still smooth,
some dented, but each one shining
in the hot, late-summer sun.

*

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including 2River, The Bellevue Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, The Closed Eye Open, Dappled Things, The Examined Life, La Piccioletta Barca, Lifelines, Natural Bridge, Please See Me, WLA, Work, and The Write Launch. He has also published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs) that has been accepted by Finishing Line Press.

Two Poems by Penelope Moffet

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Pirates

I peel a banana, cut it into pieces
I can spear into my mouth on knife-tip
like a pirate, as my boss Max used to say,

laughing as he passed from his bear’s lair
through the outer office. Max is dead two years
and it’s the vernal equinox again. Hummingbirds

chase each other when I walk on ocean bluffs
wild with bush sunflowers – dark chocolate hearts,
banana-colored petals. I like my chocolate dark,

dark as those sunflower hearts, but Max loved
milk chocolate with orange centers.
The sweeter the better, he said.

Lilac blooms of low-growing ceanothus
vibrate with bees. Tiny lizards bask on dirt,
race off. While I breathe warm salty air

a friend stumbles, his head strikes concrete,
he’s taken to the E.R. with a deep gash in his scalp.
Max didn’t know his cancer would return.

People fall apart, even me, bumbling
on painful feet and knees. We’ll come back
not as ourselves but as young and healthy creatures

basking on dirt paths, frisking through the air,
as flowers that make other people think
bananas, chocolate, orange.

*

Keepsake

         For Max Gest

The clock ticks softly
on the shelf below the TV
like a deathwatch beetle.
Late at night I hear it.

Round face full of Roman numerals,
rimmed with gold, set in mahogany,
it graced the law office desk
where I worked a quarter-century

until the boss died.
Huddled in dust,
the timepiece governs nothing
but summons Max,

who often forgot how well
his workers knew their jobs
but would stop lecturing
if I made him laugh.

In the heart of the pandemic
we kept the office going,
each laboring alone
through designated hours.

We spoke only on the phone.
More and more his voice
was wracked with coughing
as the tumors ate his lungs.

His hair grew long.
With a walker and an oxygen tank
he came in nights and weekends,
faithful as the clock that ruled my desk.

Once when I stayed late
and he came early
his smile was radiant,
the skin so taut across his face

it was like listening to a skull:
Every day I wake up
happy I’m still here.
I did not want the clock,

I turned it down three times
but on the last day
as workers came
to haul away boxed files,

donation piles and trash,
I put it in my bag.
It whispers to me
when the world is still.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have been published and are upcoming in many literary journals, including Calyx, Halfway Down the Stairs, ONE ART, Poemeleon, The Rise Up Review, Sheila-Na-Gig Online and Willawaw Journal. She has been awarded artist residencies at Alderworks Alaska, Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge and the Helen R. Whiteley Center. She lives in Los Angeles and has worked as a freelance journalist, a publicist for non-profits, an editor and a legal secretary.

Two Poems by Matthew J. Andrews

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Work Song

City birds seldom call out in song.
They speak in utilitarian chirps,
a squawking vernacular to guide
them on their morning commutes –
wire to branch, branch to dirt,
dirt to highway of cloudy skies –
the way we mumble to each other
about open seats on the bus,
our heads bobbing with the staccato
rhythm of halt and motion, mouths hungry
for crumbs scattered on the street.
Yet even then there are moments,
small moments late in the day
when the drumbeat of sledge
on steel brings to the lips a tune
our mothers used to whistle
in the kitchen as they worked,
their knuckles kneaded and buckled
but their mouths high in the clouds,
soaring on wingspreads of air,
and we softly sing their memories
to the waving branches of the trees
and listen as the birds sing back.

*

My Father and I Make Sausage

Everything must be cold,
he tells me, and it is,
the chill numbing the nerves
on the tips of our fingers.

Cutting the meat away from bone,
his knifework is almost surgical,
his free hand placed carefully
away from the sharper edges.

Out of the grinder, the flesh
is a frayed rope. The machine
whirs like a table saw, singing
the same shrill sounds as silence.

He feeds the casing until we have
links stretched to capacity with fat
and muscle. Don’t prick the skin,
he tells me, or it will all spill out.

*

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer who lives in Modesto, California. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Orange Blossom Review, Funicular Magazine, Red Rock Review, Sojourners, Amethyst Review, Kissing Dynamite, and Deep Wild Journal, among others. He can be contacted at matthewjandrews.com.

Night Work by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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Night Work

In the lucid hours of insomnia
I build and multiply images—
a whole wall of unsleeping,

feel the stillness
of my husband’s body
against my unspooling.

I lift the necklace of marigolds,
a gift in Rishikesh, almost inhale
the-more-dirt-than-flower scent.

Now I’m on our road at dusk
in that echo of one gunshot.
It’s hunting season, everyone

wearing red or orange.
Where did that bullet land,
did it sink in living skin?

I am on a mission
to dig and dig
until the clink of bone,

and I find the rhyme
in love and blood.

*

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO. She has been a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press, nominated for Best of Net, the Poetry Prize Winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a Finalist for Iron Horse National Poetry Month Award. She lives in the hills of Vermont. sarahdickensonsnyder.com