“Who Do You Work For,” “HOV” & “Old Light”
by Ryan Eckes
Who Do You Work For
a speck of truth in a drop of almost anything, love sucked thru a straw
empty lots
the sudden main character, a bed of sand
i run my hand thru my hair
smoke born in fish
patches of lawn i forgot to cut
letters falling off the stone
of your face
let the songs be songs
the walls grow veins
your boss will never love you
ask me a better question
do you know what money is when it’s talking
virtue is envy, a saw in one’s head
water runs thru the walls
i can’t fight every bruise that follows me
i can hardly believe my eyes
fear of work is called desire
sun up, i look for someone to abandon me
there’s no one—everyone’s working for someone else
HOV
i keep getting ads to be an uber driver, which reminds me of a term i learned in chile
for adjunct professors—los profesores taxis—and a poem by russell edson in which
a taxi driver turns into canaries as his car flies thru a wall and back out again. that’s
where i’m at, jobwise. a cluster of canaries flying toward you. in chile, students started
evading subway fares and it turned into a rebellion. now their government has to
rewrite the constitution. in the u.s., fascists are wearing t-shirts that say “pinochet
did nothing wrong.” republicans and democrats have long agreed. so has the ny times:
capitalism is the only way, they say, and some apples are bad. so the government keeps
killing black people and jailing those who fight back. every employer encourages you
to vote. your employer is running against your employer. how are you getting home
tonight?
Old Light
the first thing to look for in a suit is your last day of work
how to take it off and for whom
when to slow the line, unchained
melody, real flowers out of pretend
flowers, perfect skull of moon
wide years of obscene radiance splitting
each season further into seasons
of distinct pleasure, eyes in your heart
to live so much the edges of paradise
stop typing, wild flowers out of gas
when they say “in your spare time”
before the sentence ends untie
it w/ your tongue or hand, keeping
meaning away from the real estate
leeches of nobody’s boulevard
these are the oranges of consciousness
blooming outside the rusted husk
of the employer’s mission
when the sun licks your wall
that means make people free
Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. His most recent books, General Motors, Fine Nothing and Wet Money, can be downloaded for free from Internet Archive. He edits Radiator Press.
Chelsea Dirck is an illustrator, musician, and maker-of-things who lives in the Hudson Valley. They like dogs, line drawings, and organizing small objects.
