Pamela Sue Hitchcock
Two POEMS
Hostile Work Environment
My supervisor says the day shift
is supposed to hate the night shift.
I am the night shift.
I wonder whether the sun
hates the moon.
When I vacuum I notice
the day-shift guy
has cut his hair in the break room.
I try to imagine cutting my hair at work,
and can’t.
His hair hangs in a spider web under the sink,
little curls, suspended.
I imagine the spider is no happier
about this than I am.
I have never met the day-shift guy,
but I lurked on his Facebook
after he wrote me a note on the break-room mirror,
right on the glass, in Sharpie, in all caps:
DO NOT REMOVE THE MOP HEAD
FROM THIS BUILDING
IT IS CLEANED DAILY
I thought, That is how
serial killers communicate!
Plus, that mop head didn’t smell
like it had been cleaned daily!
On Facebook, yes, he had curly hair,
and, now, here it was on the
floor for me to sweep.
I didn’t want my
broom or my vacuum to touch it, so
I left it. The spider left
it, too, and moved to another
building.
Is this why the moon vanishes sometimes?
She gets full, then, suddenly, there’s a
crazy mirror-note from the sun!
The moon slowly wanes then,
and disappears—then says fuck
him and begins to build
herself back up.
The Man at the Corner Conoco Was Vaping Inside
He held the largest vaping apparatus I'd ever seen—
I thought it was part of his car engine he was trying to replace,
until he sucked on it
and breathed it like a gossamer spirit at me.
I had been reading a hard-backed book all day about dance.
It looked like Isadora Duncan's silk dress.
It looked like Anna Pavlova's silk dress
in the air of the Conoco.
The man was short and seemed like he was from Spain.
He sucked on his carburetor and spewed magic at me.
After seeing men spit on the street all my life, it was refreshing.
I had to keep reminding myself his car wasn't broken down—
I'm not sure now he even had a car.
He was telling the kindhearted girl-clerk corralled at the counter
of the homespun catastrophe and tragedy of his life.
The clerk smiled and looked over
at the percolator, the glass finial full
of coffee falling.
Pamela Sue Hitchcock was born in 1959 in the Ozark Mountain foothills of Oklahoma. She has since spent all her life in these mountains, moving from town to town and from elevation to elevation, living nearly four nomadic decades in Arkansas.