DREAM JOB
I came up from under the essays, longed for sea-soaked beaches. A paper hound, building-bound, I’ve overdosed on chalk, talk. Desks, sweater vests. I’m done repeating, beating the life out of every dead poet. Which is to say, I want a new job. I’m at a loss. Where do schoolteachers go when their eyes dry out? Trolling the job search sites, sending out resumés, I hit only my current boss, with every boomerang I toss. Been too long indoors, tracing the same halls like an Etch-a-Sketch. Security footage: me abandoning my class, disappearing on one screen, reappearing on another—now with coffee, papers lost. Large bottle of painkillers in my tote bouncing against my hip like a maraca, I plod through the blur to file report cards like taxes. Isolated in my classroom, I’ve inflamed passersby with my rants. Each desperate colleague who escapes my chamber, wobbles off to clobber a neighbour. At a posh resort I’ll be a dishwasher, that’s what. I’ll stand all day—no sitting at a desk for me!— arms in a mini hot tub, a half-spa, swirling my cloth in creamy white mugs, facing the ocean over a silvery sink where cutlery chimes like lobsters inside metal traps. Someone quiet and likeable will pass me plates. My hands sponge gravy, but worry seeps in, my mind drifts from scraping scraps, to my stack of job apps. Customers crowd into my dream, wreck it. The clatter of others rushing around me. Bastards in line waiting to pay, staring me down for my greasy whites. Bitchy customers, their faces through the horizontal space between eating area and dish pit, where rubber-gloved arms cycle in an endless waterwheel. Clean corporate hands straighten silk ties this way, then that way. A different job is still a job. The dream dissipates, uncurls like an eel, circles back to chain me to this desk of steel.
UNKEMPT
Sprung from the hair salon with a smooth backcombed flip, I looked like Betty Draper in her fat phase. Went in unkempt, came out kempt. Asked for sexy-messy beach hair, paid for a docile bob. Everyone is trying to tone me down. Inwardly I scream. I conjure charisma, inventory my expired cosmetics caboodle. Create infected smoldering eyes. I believe in pipe dreams. I am in the age of ointments and creams. I wear baggy-shouldered blazers, the same black loafers with various dull skirts. Know all about healthy eating, on paper. Kale and cauliflower, good; mini-donuts and wieners, bad. A skinny boy-principal evaluated me once: stroking his silky chin hairs he nitpicked while I bootlicked. For relief I cobbled together a rhubarb cobbler. I climb out on the ledge, my resolve derelict. Sometimes I make it out to the cake district. Sleep deprivation has become a thing. Except in meetings, screenings. Dream of my dead friend, a little plump in a red pencil skirt, curled up with a glass of wine. She drinks forever in my head at night. Perspiring and coffeed-up, a beige upholstered creep, I roam the hallways’ 90-degree angles in 90-degree heat. My deodorant is a liar. Lately, I want nothing as dangerous or deep as a good night’s sleep. Love bite, now there’s a term I connect with. Sideswipe, not as much. Current phobias: allodoxaphobia, fear of opinions. A class discussion is me talking; yet, acousticophobia, fear of noise, includes my voice. Arithmophobia, fear of numerals, is ample on my bathroom scale. Atelophobia, dread of imperfection, cowers with atephobia, fear of ruin. Each morning I awake anxious but cheerful; it reminds me renewal (not change) is possible.
INEPT
I feed a careworn buffalo in my sleep. She grazes on my faux pas all night and won’t let me rest. I introduced my neighbour as “the bastard who parks his motorhome in the cul de sac.” Now he’s erecting a higher fence. Don’t worry yourself awake. One day we’ll all be released. It’s possible to hate someone after they’re dead. I do it all the time. The alcoholic’s children twice traumatized: years of yelling, then find him deceased. Maybe I shouldn’t have high-fived the priest. I’m beading my noose to make it pretty. A flat-footed angel comes to take me home. Lilac is not my colour. I chop my wedding ring on the cutting board. Resentment has its consequences: a pizza stone can be a weapon or a shield. I sow what I reap. My Venus flytrap is full. And you should see what’s in the woodshed sometime. One catheter in a lifetime is too deep. Maybe it was a mistake to fall asleep. I drank beer in an inflatable boat within weeks of nearly drowning in one. If planets are idiots stuck circling the sun, what chance do I have? Criminologists say only pedophiles are incapable of change. Yet the pile of hamburgers sold continues to grow. We’re diamonds trapped in the record’s rut. I will always love cheese. But there was no Asiago at the Don Ho anniversary show. I crave warmth, but knit holes; build ladders, but can’t climb them; smile, but look medicated; plant peas, but can’t shell them; adore pizza, but dread the man who delivers it; keep my pencils sharpened, but to a nub. Groom myself with an oversized hairbrush that shreds my skin into tiny white flags. I’m a shabby cherub. Still, I forgave myself at Crookback’s Pub.