It’s not about the “I can help” sticker for my name
badge they forget to issue or my plans
to add a wheel to qualify
the amount of help I could give
on any given day: I could help you,
I might help you, or I can’t help you.
It’s about saying “okay,” to disembodied
managers whose phone calls brandish
details, procedures:
close the garden center gate at 8
write off all the dead fish,
take trash back
to the compactor. Repetition from afar,
they can’t help but remind me
to do what I will do anyway and thank
me for it. Never reveal my okay
means yes, I can hear your voice,
not yes, sir, right away, sir.
It’s about appearing busy, project
deep cleaning aquariums,
watering every plant and tree
you can stand. Standing against
a counter brings burdens. Standing
in groups increases the chance
of employee-seeking-managers recalling
a reoccurring dream: aisles full
of anxious customers, impatient
before they roll through the parking
lot, and not a single hourly
redshirt in the break room.
Push a steel stocking
cart to the backroom to fill
with hose reels, to the front,
unload on to shelves,
a one car train. This must mean
something beyond swerving
shopping carts. Notice instead
this hour’s third Phil Collins song.
It’s about how the basics bag many
employees in the grey
months between orientation
and their name badge
in a sock drawer. Don’t just come
on time, wait the punch
clock’s time. What does will have
to do with work and scheduled
appearances? To think about
it will only mean absence,
and: no show, no phone call.
Call in to translate extenuating circumstances
get a manager to say “okay,” as in “I don’t believe
you and your coworkers will curse
you for weeks, or soon, you will no longer work
here to annoy me.” Enough silence. Predictions,
a betting pool, of your exact last
day and circumstances that finally
get your name blackened
off the schedule. Already, your face
will fade from collective memory
like shrinking shelves of Christmas
past wrapping paper.
Originally from the hilly corner of Ohio, Mark Allen Jenkins’s poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, River Styx, South Dakota Review, Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio, and Still: The Journal. He completed a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas and currently teaches at an international school in China.
Image: “I Know Who I Want To Take Me Home, Colonie Center” by Daniel Nester
Pine Hills Review 