Sketch?

This is a poem about why I hate my sketchbook.
Which I am writing this poem in.
This is not a poem about flowers, love, puppies, tacos, death, or war.
Well, maybe war.
Because I have been fighting a personal war against this sketchbook and
all it represents to me
for as long as I can remember.
I hate this sketchbook because it is from the art supply store.

The art store.
What an oxymoronic sacrilege.
I have always hated the art store.
And I sure as hell hated being sent there to buy art school supplies
with money I did not even have for food
in order to attempt
to make art about how much I hate conspicuous consumerism.
So wrong.
So wrong.
So very wrong.

This sketchbook is an atrocity.
Its crisp unmarred black jacket a glossy paper coffin and
its virginal white pages flaunting the supremacy of whiteness.
Its soul-less perfection the total foil
of any aesthetic decision I would ever make.
Its manufactured geometric symmetry
an avatar for the straitjacketed strip-mall retail outlets
it was created in the image of.
A banal and hateful mendacity.
A labotamous runestone set against the mad thinking of sanity
in a world gone wrong.
A logjam in the well of my creativity.
Its perfect pages made of paper
most likely tortured from red earth and brown people.
My sketchbook is like the scarred and stitched body
of an abused and anorexic Brazilian plastic-surgery supermodel trophy wife
in blank bound form.

My best works of art always came
from castoffs.
Recycling the half-used detritus of slothful unfulfilled American shopaholics
into my work.
My sketchbooks as a kid were always salvaged paper
shoved inside floppy dogeared folders found on school floors.
I was always a scrounger
hoarding garbage and refuse
until it began its magical dance of inspired transformation
into something the world had never seen.
An immaculate conception from hallowed dumpsters
that demand no coin and impose no judgments.
Occasionally I stole things
back in the day
which felt mostly justified
although I stopped after they locked me up for a night.

How in the name of God could art come from plastic paint stacked
so neatly
so primly
so presumptuously
on cold metal shelves
tended to by unimaginative republican retirees in polo shirts?
How could Truth emerge from anything sold out by the mall?

I fucking hate this sketchbook.
This perfect plastic volume.
This soul-whore.
It is everything I have ever railed against.
I would that I were desecrating it
but nothing comes to mind that could rectify or redeem its upcharged worthlessness.
So instead
I am just writing in it.

The Really Free Pizza

I on my job at the big hotel. They have sent me down to the valet stand out front bearing copies of our new union contract, just ratified. We have left the AFL-CIO. A confederacy against the nativist conservancy of the old guard. We are now a part of UNITE HERE, which is busying itself organizing the sometimes undocumented immigrants that keep the lights burning in Vegas. We are the new, polyglot face of rank-and-file unionism. According to the labor journalists. Except no one down here knows a damn thing about it. The valet staff is loitering out front.
"Here," I say to Hiwot the Ethiopian, handing him a crisply stapled ream.
"Wass diz?" He fumbles with the papers foreignly.
"New union contract."
Hiwot can only read a little at best, like most of his colleagues in the valet department - who fudge the vehicle tickets they are required to fill out.
"Wass diz say righ' here?" he demands abruptly, pointing mid-page.
"That says that the company can't search your locker without your permisson."
"Whuz dat mean?" He squints incomprehensibly.
"It means the company can't search your locker without your permission."
Hiwot nods dismissively, though clearly with no grasp of the jist of this contractual stipulation or its significance to anyone in particular. He turns away from me to bellow sullenly at the doorman.
"Baba! I hungry - when we eat?"
Krikor is scrawling indecipherable hieroglyphics concerning a tan Cadillac onto a blue valet ticket. He wheels around from the driveway and adjusts his spectacles.
"Baby. Please. I have-a to call the some-a place for to get us some-a food. Just wait a little bit okay Papa." Everyone male is Papa to Krikor. A quirk of his extra-Americanness. Krikor is a hustler of the old school. Born in Italy to Armenians, he cut his teeth on the windy and corrupt streets of Chicago. His silver tongue and charming charisma keeps us all from going hungry on the job.
Krikor strolls toward us and cackles theatrically while picking up the receiver of the valet stand phone.
"Yes. Hello baybe." to the hotel operator "Please get me-a the Papa John's please. Oh thank you so much baby." He waits to be connected to the pizza joint on West 7th.
"Hello. Yes. Please can I-a speak with Stacey. Oh thank you so much." Krikor is a fast talker. He lays it on thick when he is wheedling something out of someone. He is put on hold for a moment and hums a foreign modal ditty for the duration. After a few moments the manager gets on the line.
"Oh yes! Hello! Mr. Stacey! So good to a-talk to you! Yes." Krikor lights up like the oversize Christmas tree on Fountain Square. "Well you know I am-a pretty good Sir. Listen though, the people here that stay in-a the hotel. They keep asking us 'how is this new-a pizza the Papa John's they have' and we don't-a know how should we tell them. We have never-a eat this pizza..." Krikor fumbles about on the valet stand, looking for the name of the new menu item. The latest novelty pizza is always advertised on the coupons that the drivers leave with us to encourage our patrons to order from them. He has found the slip his hand was searching for. "...yes, the-a what is it...the new-a chicken-a barbecue. Yes that one. Yes. Oh thank you so much Mr. Stacey. Yes please also bring us some coupons too though. You know we need them. Okay! Thank you!"
He has instantaneously and effortlessly spun a web of lies. We all stand by admiringly and anticipatingly.
Krikor concludes his hustle, returns the phone to its cradle and turns about to face us triuphantly. His scam has worked again.
"Babys" he tells us with Old World paternalism "The pizza is-a on his way."
Hiwot scowls.
"Baba what kind you get?"
"Hiwot you have hear me on-a the phone! Is chicken baby!" Krikor gestures with the expressive exasperation of a worked up Italian with ADHD. Hiwot is a pain in the ass and he pisses off everyone. Some days he all but refuses to park cars at all and the rest of us have to pick up the slack. Hiwot frowns and mumbles about not liking chicken. Krikor swears at him in three languges and spits hatefully on the ground. Just then a hotel guest strolls past and he instantly returns to his massive 300-watt smile and greets her pleasantly.
An hour later we are all louging inside the valet stand, stuffed and sated with this greasy concoction that Krikor has procured. Rando the Estonian warbles words of gratitude through this unintelligably thick accent.
I scratch my belly and take a quick nap in grease-staned futia armchair in the valet stand. Three more hours on this shift.

a comb and a sneer

Admir
is adjusting the blondish bowlcut
atop his perennially pubescent Bosniak visage
in the big mirror
he will not let anyone take his picture
panics when a camera appears
lives under an assumed name
saw beheadings in the street as a child of five
has a bumper sticker to remember Srebrenica
fugee almost all his life
smuggled in an out of half of Europe by shady connections
a Moslem he
will not ear pepperoni
but has changed into his beloved Adidas soccer jersey for
a night of hard drinking
sprays cheap cologne
auf wiedersehen
we tell each other

La Camarera

tomato juice
i sip
slouchingly

my immigrant ancestors crossed the Atlantic
fleeing the heavy hand of the Iron Chancellor
for whom was named the state capitol of North Dakota
they washed ashore in a city named by old veterans of the American Revolution
for a Roman emperor
and built on land stolen from butchered Shawnee
Cincinnati congealed into a city selling saltpork to the slavemasters downriver
my people learned Englishe
rode streetcars through the West End
later bought Chevys on credit
and drank Hudepohl during Reds games

your people are the survivors
of a bloody genocidal conquest
that felled most of Mesoamerica
with bubonic plague
smallpox
and iron swords
who were they specifically
i want to ask you
De donde eres usted?
but i can see you are busy
Oaxacans?
Mixtecs?
mestizos
enslaved by Aztec nobility and then raped by conquistadores
(Hernando de Soto used to have a big luxury sedan named after him
all the way up here in los estados unidos)

my Germans profited by
landing in an emerging empire
a former British settler colony whose wealth
was built on industry and trade
the Puritans' sober woolens were
the predecessor of the ubiquitous gray flannel suit
today worn by bankers the world over

in contrast the Spanish wanted mostly
silver
gold
and religious conversion
expelling Iberia's Jews just before decimating the Arawak
los conquistadores dreamed of
encomiendas
vast feudal estates
transplanted from the medieval Castile of their imaginations
except in this version with indigenos cast as the serfs
instead of them
(Englishmen did the same in Georgia)
the treasures of the Aztecas were soon spent fighting the doomed Reconquesta
against Protestantism
leaving only empty coffers
and illiterate peasants

Porfirio Diaz said, "Poor Mexico - so far from God, and so close to the United States!"
we took Aztlan in 1848
a third of Old Mexico
drew lines across the Sonoran
- surely one of the globe's most artificial borders -
and then built quaint villas in Inglewood with tile roofs
where Boyz N the Hood was later filmed

all this has brought you here
to Ohio of all places
we both know this
this is why you are serving me breakfast
and not the other way around
eggs and chorizo
i am courteous
and i always tip thirty percent in diners

Isms and fancy talk

in Cincinnati i have excitedly learned to grasp many new words
a plethora if you will
my mind has been blown to a large extent

aesthetic
gouache
anti-fashion
photorealism
composition
objectification
chiaroscuro
conceptual
postmodernist
Luddite
postcolonialism
postindustrial

and then later

agency
misnomer
Metropolitan Statistical Area
sustainability
deindustrialization
Rustbelt
Sunbelt
settler colony
Bantu
exurb
neocolonial
caudillo
Marxist
anti-racist
nationalism
Orientalism
Islamophobia
imam
Hegelian dialectic
Other
historiography
social capital
class
tautological
Urban Appalachian
whiteness
discourse
segregation
gentrification
opression
activism
anarchist
heteronormative
GRE
fellowship
tenured

and some others

now i am moving again
would fain that i were shipping out for the Third World
or throwing myself at humanitarian crises
and spicy foods
rather than moving in with more fleshless ideological abstractions
alas alack this great flatness the Buckeye State has sucked me in for another spell
what new words await?

Celebrity

the sable glinting kenworth pulls up alongside my air conditioned guardshack
i jot down the carrier, tractor, and trailer numbers on my clipboard
and slam open the door
the dense viscous heat of the Ohio valley rushes in
"Howdy. First name sir?"
"First name's Ree-ick." he spits tobacco juice toward the flower planter
his voice a heavy brogue from somewhere Deep South
i note his identity and hand him his paperwork
the bill of lading has him bound for wheeling west virginia
a lowe's store
everbody needs drywall
i hit the button to raise the gate that lets him in the plant
"Ay anybody ever tell yew ya look a lot like that Buddy Holly?" he asks
"Yeah sometimes."
"It's them glasses man. I betchoo git a lot a girls."
"Not too much man. There aint too many girls down here today."
"Mebbe y' oughtta learn to play the gi-tar!"

Linder

i had to get my best suit cleaned
a friend was getting married in a small burnt out factory town
four hours away in indiana
where the land is as flat as the yellowed linoleum
on the kitchenette floor of a doublewide doing service as a meth lab
vacant fields rolling by forever on route 37
we rode the 17 downtown together for my 3-11 shift
me and my charity thrift store suit
after my afternoon classes were over
(i had to explain to a prof that the dress shirt she always saw me in
was in fact my uniform
and not a manifestation of some affinity for dresswear)
i keycarded my way into the cold fluorescence of the hotel kitchen
past the huge stainless steel dishtable steaming with suds and garbage
waited for the encrusted elevator with a refugee housekeeper from Sierra Leone
who will not make eye contact with me
ever
i have read about the genocide committed there
but her english is terrible and i dont want to ask
damn elevator always was slow as hell
original from when the place was built in the 50's
i ascend to the cavernous and dim 3rd floor
the bowels of the 22-floor building
where all the immense mechanical systems lay sputtering and groaning
where Linder's office was tucked
underneath massive vibrating furnace ducts covered in grease-stained silver insulation
just off the laundry room
which she was in charge of
"Howdy, Miss Linder. Got a suit here needs cleaned."
"Alrighty" she says
rifling through her beige steel desk for a dry cleaning slip
employees get half off rates
best deal in town
i pay her for the dry cleaning and she
launches into a sermon about how they need a new union steward in the bellstand
wants me to take the office apparently
i am proud to work at a union hotel
and the union's presence is why i was not put out in the cold last winter
when our clientele up and vanished leaving no trace
i know this for a fact
and i love unions
beleaguered as they are
in this day and time of neoliberalist cutbacks
my old man's union paid for my glasses for a decade and a half
and the braces that corrected my severe overbite
old Linder rattles on and on
she is no longer looking at me
distracted by virulent memories of employers' abuses
over the decades
and how much she wants the union to fight for us
i have no idea what she is talking about at this point
and i hate this job
only kept it so i could read on the clock
the last thing i want is to be more invested in this place
i promise her i'll think about it
bid her good day
and shuffle off
past the cobwebbed smoking area
enclosed in chain-link fencing despite the fact that we are indoors
to the employee cafeteria down the hall
where a four-foot-nine housekeeper is standing on a chair
screaming clownishly at a six-foot-eight musclebound maintenance man
'What mothafucka? What? You aint got shit to say now!"
the gaggle of housekeepers around her laugh uproariously clapping and stomping
Wheel of Fortune blares over the tv mounted in the cement block wall
someone buys an m
yes there are three m's
applause
i scan the salad bar
iceberg lettuce salad with a few stray cherry tomatoes
ranch dressing
stale crutons on ice
an eerie soup boils and bubbles in the steamtable
better than nothin i reckon

Detailer, 2003

when i was twenty
i dropped out of art school
took a job
detailing cars
for a week
they had an ad in the paper
seven dollars an hour
to breathe undercoating spray
and bathe in solvents and nasty chemicals
place was an OSHA nightmare class action lawsuit waiting to happen
an unlikely possibility though
most of the employees didnt read too good

see the japanese carmakers
they shipped mostly by rail
which meant that the new hondas
nissans
toyotas
arrived at the dealerships
covered in a fine grit
we called rail dust
our job was to wash this stuff off
and make the new cars look new
we found some marks we couldnt wash off
they were from acid rain i was told
it struck me as twistedly ironic
that we were struggling to keep the finish on new cars
from getting
fucked up
by pollution
made by cars

one day they had me working in this pole barn longside two teenage reprobates
pulling the packaging plastic
off the seats and interiors of landrovers and cadillacs
this fucked up ebonics-spouting fat white kid called his friend
"yeah man i just got done drivin' a new caddy!
shit was tight as hell!
an' i'm 'bout to hop in a new landrover too."
he bragged about his access to these totems of wealth and power
with overstated and hollow virility
but we were only getting minimum wage
to ready them for their new owners
who had to be rich as hell
compared to the likes of us
aint that america

The Chocolate Fight

Admir the bellman
who is Bosnian
and Hiwot the valet
who is Ethiopian
are fighting in the bellcloset
over a box of Walgreen's chocolate
brought in by Krikor the Armenian doorman.
"Baba lemme see tha' shocolate!" cries Hiwot.
"Fuck you! I hat it ferst!" Admir screams back.
They tussle
tugging the cheap box
back and forth between them.
With comic predictability,
it tears.
All the chocolates
end up
scattered
across the scuffed 12-inch vinyl tile.
No one will eat them off the floor.
They both blame each other.
Admir slams the door to the bellstand
as hard as he can.
I look up from the 608-page A History of the Modern Middle East
I was assigned
roll my eyes
and shake my head.

Auto & Truck of Mayberry

The summer I graduated high school
I worked for the mechanics in my hometown
running parts
changing oil.
I learned how to rebuild the bearing assembly
on semi trailer wheels
in a sweltering gravel lot
and spruced up the big yellow buses
from the vocational school
so they could pass safety inspection from the county.
Spray-on undercoating
and new seat covers
to replace the ones my classmates had carved their initials into.
They sent me to distant parts warehouses
in a salvaged S-10
with powdering paint
and a failing rear end.
I hauled Peterbilt radiators
the size of armchairs
and mufflers the size of acetylene tanks.
I fetched lunch from the Frisch's over in the next town
and swept the floor
when there was nothing else to do.

One day Chuck
who used to run the Sohio on Main Street
(until they got bought out by BP)
brought in his workvan for a service.
Roger Ettlinger
who was the boss's brother
backed it right up into the steel beam
of the rack he had intended to put it on.
The ass end of the van was crushed.
I swept shattered safety glass silently
while furious Rog' fumed and swore.
'Goddammit! I got so much on my mind
I can't fuckin' pay attention fer shit!"
He was a deeply troubled man
going through a divorce
unhappy in his career.
And now that I am in similar circumstances,
getting divorced and all the rest,
I truly understand how that kinda shit can happen.

Upon a remark made to me by an observant and sympathetic member of the custodial staff of my university, after witnessing me repeatedly dropping books all over from the ridiculously massive stack I am trundling out of the library at 11:30 pm on a Tuesday


"Sometimes
you just can't
win fer losin'."
She smiled wryly
with a wise twinkle
that conveyed more knowledge
than that whole
damn
library.
After 22 years of school
I can safely say
that I usually like the janitors
more
than I like most of the students.

Graveyard Shift

I man the gate at the world's largest drywall plant
in Silver Grove, Kentucky
3rd shift.
Kenworths and Freightliners slowly drift in
through the night
like behemoth nocturnal catfish, trolling for a bite.
The truckers are rednecks, hillbillies, poor Black men,
Russians, Cubans, Africans, Mexicans, Bosnians
all sojourning refugees from somewhere in the developing world.
A hundred accents and
a dozen kind of reading problems
make explaining plant policy complicated.
"Te nombre senior? Se require un casco aqui." I say, clipboard in hand.
"De donde eres usted?" they ask me surprised.
"I'm from here. I'm American."
The grizzled night crew employees appear suddenly
out of the night mist
behind the wheel of loud rides that have seen better times
smoking Winstons, Marlboros, GT Ones, and Kentucky's Best.
I dutifully record their entrance and egress times
on the appropriate alphabetical clipboards.
Their names, recited in Kentucky drawl
are a lifetime of sunburnt workdays, bad tattoos,
cold beer, and well-deserved hunting trips:
"Billy Gentry, Maintenance"
"Tom Workman, Distribution"
Addington, Carter, Deaton, Henslee, Holloway, and McQueary
hillbilly names with a few lost German ones thrown in too
Honaker, Obermeyer, Schnieder
I sit in my little metal guard shack
steeltoes propped up on the desk
camera monitors before me
as the fog rolls in off the Ohio and
3 a.m. freight trains blast by
shuttling coal, cattle, and mysterious boxcars to points distant.
I wonder about life on the rails,
glancing up from my library books
as the diesel locomotive thunders across the grade crossing.
From inside the plant
sirens wail as something mechanical
fails on line number 2.
Four deafening reports of chattering equipment shatter the night.
Moths flicker around the dim orange haze of the fifty-foot lightpoles.
A solitary dumptruck passes on Route 8.
Silence after.
The world sleeps,
and I am paid mostly
for my willingness to ignore my diurnal rhythm.