Garden of Machines

1.
Summer job, Westinghouse Electric Corp.
Money for college, the ad read,
and "life experience."

Each day I stood at my machine
that throbbed like electric migraine.
Each night I dreamed that machine,
hands jerking levers under the blanket,
then woke to dream again,
the factory a sleeping panther
in a garden of machines,
the sun draping spinal cords
gently on the walls.


2.
Wisest philosopher I ever met,
Melinda Hill, old Tao janitor,
who gave up cleaning floors in 1967,
"They just get dirty again -- fuck'em."
She was a "lifer."
Carved her retirement date on her wrist
with permanent dye: 1982.
"I'll be dead by then," she said,
touching each number one by one
down her tired old bone.


3.
"Crazy Mary,"
stuck to her cigarette,
eyes swimming in her thick glasses,
once stapled her hand to a crossboard,
on purpose, the bosses said,
to claim insurance.
But she said God told her,
to punish her
because of her "bad parts" smelled.

They had a little chapel in E Block,
panther eyes peering through stain glass jungle.
Mary prayed, propped on her mop pail,
crossed herself with a toilet brush,
then went back to work, humming to machines.
When she left each day,
she had pencils, pens, paper clips, soap cakes,
sugar packs, Kleenes, plastic spoons and steelies
secreted in her sacred holes.


4.
Skeleton shift,
my eyes met the eyes
of the girl on machine 23.
We snuck over the barbed wire
to the graveyard, fell onto a stone slab,
I felt myself melt into muted names,
heard the grass tremble with treasonous moths,
and while pirate ships plundered the stars,
she swallowed my salvation whole.


5.
The young woman on 27
ate her lunch alone outside C Block,
reading, shifting a hairpin down each page,
she'd try to rein in her blowing hair,
but hair knows what it wants.

One morning she was cleaning her machine
when it suddenly activated itself.
The stamp press came down gently,
like a priest smothering a moth.
She tried to walk at first,
then collapsed like a broken xylophone.

These are her notes.
The baby was stillborn.


6.
Thomas Null on 36, the hole-puncher,
was secretly apprenticed to despair.
I thought he was wise, since he laughed at silence.
Then one day he disappeared mid-shift,
and I found him dead on his front porch swing.
It was only when I walked his route alone
I saw the cruel genius of his escape.
Saints & Sinners, No Answer, The Alibi,
Utopia -- a bar on each corner.
He must have seen he could drink his way home.
His eyes had captured something of the sky,
lonely angels still clinging to the wind.

-- Sean Lause