Lisa Lewis: “Factory Worker”
FACTORY WORKER
Not that life is really that long for humans.
My second job was at a furniture factory,
and I was too good. Fast with a glue gun,
fast on the line, too fast, I was warned.
In the early mornings I walked down stairs
to a dark door with a punch clock inside.
A brush of fear, a quiver of self-importance,
forgive me, I was still a kid,
and I knew I was going to get out
every day when I took my place
at the station assembling the end tables.
The workers bent to their rhythmic labors,
and at lunch they talked about their families.
One year one of the men asked me to marry him,
good thing I didn’t. His dad had worked on glass
even after it took two fingers, even after
he used the others to grope me in the car
when the boyfriend got out to grab something
he’d forgotten. The second he was back I told.
I described his father’s face as he draped his arm
around my shoulder and stretched down.
I remember his face like dark stairs, the building
without windows so we couldn’t spend company
time with the world where we belonged.
I turn the page to the world I escaped to, books
and rapt detachment, assumed betterness.
The students have mythologized the rising
stairs of the building where we practice
our clean and brilliant talk, don’t walk there
until you graduate or you never will. It’s an old
building, older than the factory, with long windows
and crusty blinds crooked in their slots
and people who have not worked in factories.
The wonder is that some of them can tell
I don’t belong there with them. They don’t mention
what gives me away, maybe the crooked teeth.
They want me gone. Even though I’m still fast
on the line, if not the glue gun, and everything
that happened once returns again and again.
Not in the rough protective gloves now,
not in the gloom where I swept up shavings,
but here in the light rooms with the poetry
and the sweet snobbery of staying away
from people who have to work with their hands
or hoping to change them by telling them
how we are falling to pieces, they should look
at their faces in bright glass and hone in
on the errors in the eyes, the hands
slipping down to their breasts
when there’s no one there to witness,
fingers dropping severed to a dusty floor,
the entire broken future red and silent.
Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (WordWorks, 2018) and a chapbook, The Borrowing Days (Emrys, 2021). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in New Letters, Puerto del Sol, SoFloPoJo, Florida Review, National Poetry Review, Diode, Agni Online, and elsewhere. Lewis directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor-in-chief of the Cimarron Review.