Skip to main content

Bill Garvey

Fired

I remember being called to the office
of the vice president of human resources
with the consultant hired just for this
occasion, who looked nothing like
George Clooney from that movie and
who told me I wasn’t a fit in their future
which made axing me as legitimate as
losing my designated parking spot.
I wasn’t allowed to gather personal
things like family photos or simply
saying goodbye, but when they took
my Blackberry (despite it holding
the details of everyone I knew) I felt
stripped of more than that job but
every job I ever had. But let me be
completely honest with you, dear
reader, I fired myself. I hated that place
and most of the people who worked
in it. I hated stepping up the worn marble
stairs to my third-floor office with its
view of the iconic New England town
and its square which was actually a circle
but I digress. I worked for the money.
I never harbored lofty dreams, had no
causes I believed in, no aspirations to do
anything other than earn since I was
thirteen stuffing fliers in newspapers,
blowing inky snot from my nose in
Uncle Ed’s pickup, him handing me
a Coke that never tasted so goddamn
good, or sixteen, unloading mangoes
and pineapples from boxcars where a
snake slunk from a crate of bananas
and slithered through the cool night
as if it was a cove in the South Pacific,
or seventeen, pumping gasoline back
when I’d smile at you as I squeegeed
your windshield. I found a job in the
Midwest with a larger company who
were awfully nice to me, but after they
walked me to my cubicle, pointing out
the Men’s Rooms and where to get coffee
I never felt more defeated in my life
working for just another insurance
company in the middle of corn and soy
which I whispered over the phone to
someone back home. The next morning
a dozen ear of corn appeared in my
cubicle with a cantaloupe the size
of a basketball and two tomatoes as
plump as the faces of newborns. Later,
I sipped wine on the deck of my
extended stay hotel, and for some
reason Uncle Ed entered my thoughts,
as did faces of motorists through
squeaky clean windshields, even
the snake made an appearance, black
and slippery as motor oil spilling into
Springfield as if it had a chance,
and I bit into the best ear of corn
I have ever had, and then, for the
longest time, I just watched the sun
go down and this amazing swarm
of swallows circle and swerve and sign
someone’s name on the horizon.


Bill Garvey's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in several journals including Cimarron Review, Rattle, Nixes Mate Review, Quiddity, New Verse News, Margie, Concho River Review, The Worcester Review, 5AM, Slant, New York Quarterly, Cloud Lake Literary and others. Bill and his wife live in Toronto and Nova Scotia. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and