In the desert there is a pocket that
Is the poem. A watery bubble on an
Arid surface, like a fingertip on a
Voided screen that sparks to touch. The failed eavesdrop.
It looks like life, or its mimesis, here
Among the droning decadence of dune
After dune, shrugging, as chrysanthemums
Shrug at a burni…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had.’
‘Poetry’s strongest response, on the other hand, is determined, open-ended world-making, which is the work of empathy.’
‘No more, no longer the sweet difference / Between real and dream I knew.’
‘It was a cruelty I first tried to blame on nature, / Then on growing up, on falling off, on it being / Just an old myth.’
‘you gotta see this truck that ignored the height sign / on the underpass and now it’s lodged like an overlarge pill’
A poem by Nathalie Shapero.
‘Thoughts sharpen themselves on the flints of one another and pierce me like a knife in my middle, sunk deep and twisted around.’
